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Cross MultiInter TransAbstracts and BiographiesThe Biennial Conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, U.K. and Ireland in association with LAND2, a landscape, place and visual arts research networkC-M-I-T Abstracts Wednesday 6 SeptemberParallel Panels Session APanel 1: Inter-genre Inter-national: Artists in CollaborationAnne-Marie CreamerAnne-Marie Creamer is a British artist whose work experiments with cinematic forms using video, drawing, literary texts, filmed staged scenarios, and live voice-over. For Anne-Marie stories are always complexly entangled in place. She exhibits at venues such as the Whitechapel Art Gallery, Sir John Soane's Museum, Palm Springs Art Museum and Kunstvereniging Diepenheim. She has programmed events with Cubit Gallery and Parasol unit foundation, and she was co-curator on ‘Kome til deg i Tidende– a meta newspaper’, with the Sogn og Fjordane Kunstmuseum. More at this panel, four artists will discuss the challenges, complexities, and rewards of international collaboration—a process that may be especially difficult but also especially fruitful when the pairs of artists did not know each other before beginning to work together. Anne-Marie Creamer, a British artist, who “over the years [has] come to prefer the title ‘storyteller,’” and Laura-Gray Street, a poet from Virginia, will talk about their collaboration on the cinematic possibilities of poetry and place, story and structure—who tells the stories of place and how? They will also address the challenge of exploring landscape and the narrative of landscape while residing on different continents—and how a trans-Atlantic collaboration creates its own landscape of narrative. Barbara Howey, a British painter, and Ann Fisher-Wirth, a poet from Mississippi, will consider how their paintings and poems address cross-cultural aspects of damaged landscapes in the American South and Britain. Their presentation will span various personal, political, and historical aspects of their encounters with trees within landscapes that have been marred by pollution, flytipping, and neglect. The poets will also give brief readings from their work, and (if possible) the visual artists’ work will accompany the readings on PowerPoint. Ann Fisher-Wirth,Ann Fisher-Wirth’s fourth book of poems is Dream Cabinet (Wings Press 2012). With Laura-Gray Street, she coedited the groundbreaking Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity UP 2013). Ann’s collaborative manuscript Mississippi with the photographer Maude Schuyler Clay will appear from Wings Press in 2017. Her poems appear widely and have received numerous awards. She has been granted residencies at The Mesa Refuge; Djerassi Resident Artists Program; Hedgebrook; and CAMAC/Centre d’Art, Marnay, France. In April 2017 she will be Anne Spencer Poet in Residence at Randolph College, Virginia. A Fellow of the Black Earth Institute, she teaches and directs the Environmental Studies program at the University of Mississippi. Also she teaches yoga in Oxford, MS. is sorely in need of an update.Barbara HoweyBarbara Howey is an artist based in East Anglia in the UK. Her work centres on contemporary painting within differing projects. She is currently guest editor of The Journal of Contemporary Painting on a double issue exploring the idea of Commitment in Painting, to be published later in 2017. She has also recently curated an exhibition focusing on contemporary figurative women painters called Real Lives - Painted Pictures. (2016-2017). Her recent painting project focuses on how urban and rural landscapes merge in a terrain of alienation, waste and dereliction. She was selected for the John Moores Painting Prize in 2014 and is exhibiting in a 3 Museum tour to China as part of the Contemporary British Painting group (2017). More at Grey StreetLaura-Gray Street is author of Pigment and Fume (Salmon Poetry) and Shift Work (forthcoming from Red Bird Chapbooks), and co-editor with Ann Fisher-Wirth of The Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity UP). Her work has appeared in Blackbird, The Colorado Review, The Notre Dame Review, Poecology, Poet Lore, Poetry Daily, Shenandoah, , and elsewhere. Street holds an MA from UVA and MFA from Warren Wilson. She is associate professor of English and directs the Creative Writing Program at Randolph College in Lynchburg, VA. More at Panel 2: ‘Managed’ spacesWilliam WelsteadWilliam Welstead began his career as a metallurgist in the Sheffield steel industry. He has subsequently worked as a teacher, management consultant and Welsh hill farmer. In parallel with his formal career, he has followed academic interests in ecology, environmental justice, social science and literature. He received a PhD from Aberystwyth University in 2012 for an ecocritical reading of contemporary Welsh poetry in English. Since 2011 he has lived on the Isle of Tiree in Scotland where he now researches independently on the interplay between culture, ecology and literature. His publications include papers in Green Letters – Studies in Ecocriticism, and for the French Society for Scottish Studies. William Welstead is co-editor with Professor Peter Barry of Extending Ecocriticism: crisis, collaboration and challenges in the environmental humanities (Manchester University Press for publication in 2017). He is currently researching for a book on ecology, the animal turn and sheep in contemporary poetry.Interpreting Natural Heritage: Collaboration between science and the humanitiesThe basic interpretation panel is a commonplace feature of nature reserves and countryside parks. Some are very poorly produced, but others are the work of interpretation professionals where panels may be supplemented by visitor centres, webcams and satellite tracking of individual animals. Freeman Tilden in Interpreting our Heritage (fourth edition 2007 [1957]) set down ‘the chief aim of interpretation [as] not instruction but provocation’. This philosophy still informs practitioners in the development and implementation of interpretation plans. There is an increasing trend for writers, artists and story tellers to be invited to complement the ecologically derived conservation message. This paper addresses two questions: firstly can the techniques of ecocriticism, including close reading and cultural studies, be applied to the products of interpretation and secondly are creative writers and artists constrained by the client agenda when accepting commissions from conservation bodies, or are they as free to provoke as if they were working under their own initiative? How conscious is any collaboration between writers and visual artists in this type of place-based project?The paper will give a close reading of interpretation panels and displays on the Cors Dyfi Nature Reserve where panels are complemented by a visitor centre and a 3600 observatory that bears a remarkable resemblance to Jeremy Bentham’s ‘panopticon’. This reserve combines a narrative about the importance of wetland habitats with the opportunity to watch ospreys on their nest from the observatory or by webcam and to track their migration by satellite. For another site, run by the RSPB, the projection of corporate identity onto the ‘official’ countryside will be considered through logos, straplines and house interpretation styles.Collaboration by visual artists in such projects will be considered by a close reading of a painting by wildlife artist Kim Atkinson, which she completed during a short collaborative residency with a group of artists at the RSPB Minsmere reserve. The Poetry Path in Kirkby Stephen, which was commissioned as an interpretation project, has twelve poems, one for each month, by poet Meg Peacocke, carved in stone by Pip Hall and placed along a countryside trail. Some of the poems were set in a dry-stone wall built by master wall-builder Steve Allen. A further project on the Tweed River will be discussed. Here each writer was paired with a visual artist and was commissioned to produce works for a section of the Tweed catchment. The output included prose, poetry, painting and public art. In this project the creative artists were given free rein, but even here some sites were served by more conventional interpretive display panels.What does this mingling of environmental narrative with the output from the creative humanities tell us about the increasingly complex relationships between the arts and science? Can creative writers and artists remain aloof from a conservation agenda when the value, implicit in their designation as SSSI or AONB, can be detected by a close reading of the interpretation products?Rachel DowseRachel Dowse studied English Literature at Sussex University, and went on to complete a Masters in Wild Writing: Literature and the Environment at Essex University, finishing in 2014. From April to September 2015 she spent three weeks of every month living and working full time as a Volunteer Trainee Warden on Flat Holm Island, a nature reserve in the Bristol Channel, and then spent a year as a Volunteer Officer Warden at the Greenwich Peninsula Ecology Park. She has been published in Earthlines and The Island Review, and currently works for ecoACTIVE, an environmental education charity in Hackney.The Streams Run Both Ways: Sense of place in a man-made natural landscapeBritain, especially England, is an entirely managed landscape. Even those areas left to become apparently “wild”, have been allowed to do so due to somebody’s management decision. The habitat management plan of most nature reserves and wild spaces, rarely crosses over with nature writing, despite being essential to the “sense of place” in these landscapes. In part, this is because the more obvious the management plan is, the less “natural” the landscape is considered.An extreme example of this is the Greenwich Peninsula Ecology Park, where I spent a year as a Volunteer Officer Warden. The park was created from scratch out of waste ground (previously a gasworks) fifteen years ago, as part of the “regeneration of Docklands” which took place around the millennium. Every habitat in the park is man-made, and strictly managed to prevent succession, yet many visitors assume it is a piece of wild nature somehow preserved throughout the long history of the Greenwich Peninsula.While the land the park exists on is owned by The Land Trust and cannot be built on, it is now threatened by plans for a tall building to be built directly next to the park, which place it in shade and will drastically alter both the biodiversity and general experience of the park. Currently, the building is being campaigned against by the general public, while those actually employed at the park are not allowed to publicly protest. The campaign is causing visitors to think closely about what defines the park for them, and how this could be changed by the new development. By the time of the conference, a decision may have been made, and this will be discussed in my presentation, as well as comparing personal impressions of the park with the management processes which maintain it.The park exists in a dual state of both manmade and natural. It has extremely high biodiversity, in part due to the range of habitats available (which are both a weakness and a strength), and in part due to its position as an island of natural habitat in an area of rapidly increasing development. This paper will discuss what is meant by “wild” and “natural” in an entirely man-made and urban setting, and how changes in the area outside the park are increasingly affecting its sense of place.It will draw attention to the “hidden” management of “natural” landscapes, and why it is necessary for nature writing to engage with ecology and conservation directly, highlighting the work and decisions that go into creating, maintaining, and defining a place.Paul WilsonPaul Wilson is a researcher, typographer and writer whose work explores the intersections of language, landscape, community and communication. His current research involves the production of designed narratives of community and place and, in particular, investigates the potential for critically-engaged typographies and language-acts, focusing on sites of class experience and situated knowledge at moments or points of change or transition. Much of his work orbits ideas and ideals of utopianism found in manifestations of the utopian act, and has resulted in a broad range of activities: surveying the noticeboards found in the interior landscapes of Working Men’s Clubs, mapping the route of the march which marked the closure of Britain’s last deep coal mine, and?exploring the post-Brexit significance of the Esperanto-English dictionary held in Keighley Library, West Yorkshire. He is a Lecturer in the School of Design at the University of Leeds.?‘Not-yet’: raising the book, re-writing voices of UtopiaThe West Yorkshire town of Keighley is notable for two firsts, each a socialized response to utopian linguistic invention: the founding of the first Spiritualist Church in the UK (in 1853) and the UK's first Esperanto Society (in 1902). Both groups sought to respond to the Utopian impulses of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain via an instrumentalisation of language, whether in terms of its ability to negotiate the hinterlands of life or the potential to creativelyeliminate a need for translation.This paper takes its point of departure the introductory essay found in the lending copy of the Esperanto-English dictionary held in Keighley Library. Keighley resident Joseph Rhodes (1856-1920) was, in fact, the dictionary's compiler and played an active role in forming the society in the town. His role in the development of International Language (as Esperanto was initially known) and, as a direct consequence, the intentional community of speakers which emerged in Keighley went on to be acknowledged by its founder Ludwig Zamenhof (aka Dr Esperanto) as critical in his own wish for his invention to foster living, neutral and popular international communication. Keighley’s Esperanto Society, however, is now defunct, having enjoyed some popularity locally and nationally in the mid-twentieth century but seemingly subject to thesame gradual disengagement as seen in other socialised leisure activities by the turn of the millennium. The presentation will weave together the voices of both Rhodes and his book, using a range of authorial and typographic approaches and devices. It aims to combine speculative narrative and close reading of the dictionary’s introductory essay in order to reveal the critical potential in such linguistically-foundedtranslocal community formation. Such an enquiry allows us to map the Keighley Esperantist’s neighbourly engagement with an idea of and for language as a means to re-make the world, tracing the premature truths of this type of social dreaming via the material traces it leaves behind.Panel 3: Writing meat: flesh-eating and literature since 1900Rachael AllenRachael Allen's first collection of poetry is forthcoming with Faber. She works as an editor, and is completing her PhD at the University of Hull.?‘A Grain of Brain’: Poetically Resurrecting the CowI want to be a cow,Nothing fancy –Selima Hill, ‘Cow’The figure of the cow as symbol and metaphor – across various religions and art forms – is treasured and ancient, yet at the same time this animal in many societies exists de facto for people’s plates. In the US, UK, Europe and elsewhere, the cow exists as a commodity, enabling two contradictory figures of the animal to coexist, albeit disparately: as treasured symbol, and as meat. Looking at two collections by contemporary Anglophone female writers, Ariana Reines (The Cow, 2006) and Selima Hill (A Little Book of Meat, 1993), I will consider each writer’s self-reflexive critique of how the animal is used as linguistic figure, edible resource and source of capital. By intersecting these innovative poetries with contemporary thinking on ecofeminism and animal studies by Carol J. Adams, Nicole Shukin, Akira Mizuta Lippit and others, my essay will realise not only the position of the marginalised body of the cow as it is rendered by these poets, but the limits of our own position looking at animal bodies.From Reines’s scatological slaughterhouse to Hill’s surreal lyrics these writers work either against or deliberately within poetic modes largely considered detrimental to the poetic object – like the historically objectifying lyric address – so they may reorient the material subjects of their poems, and resurrect the body of the cow out of previously abstracted positions. Reines and Hill centralise a critique of the modes of rendering that have posited the animal’s existence as a resource, and I will explore how the symbolic and literal exploitation of an animal’s ‘flesh’ in their poems is counteracted.Sean McCorry Seán McCorry is an Honorary Research Fellow in English Literature at the University of Sheffield. He is currently working on his first monograph on technology and species difference in postwar culture. He is co-founder of ShARC (Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre).‘Soylent Green is People!’: Anthropophagy and Population EcologyFrom the late 1960s through the 1970s, a new awareness of the extraordinary growth rate of the world population reenergised Malthusian themes in environmentalism and the environmental sciences. In the field of population ecology, the publication of The Limits to Growth (1972) and The Population Bomb (1968) heightened cultural anxieties around “overpopulation”, and in the same period, a thriving subgenre of speculative fiction translated these anxieties into apocalyptic narratives of population crisis. In this paper, I aim to situate Richard Fleischer’s 1973 film Soylent Green within an analysis of the biopolitics of the contemporary scientific debate on population. In the tradition of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”, Soylent Green proposes a radical solution to the problem of population pressure and resource scarcity through the provision of a new, mysterious food source, which in the film’s last act is revealed to be reconstituted human flesh.Soylent Green testifies to the ambivalent position of the human in the biopolitics of population management. On the one hand, the human is absolutely privileged within the terms of this discourse, so that sustainability becomes sustainability for the human. In this vein, a major strand of the scientific-technical debate on “overpopulation” involved calculating and securing an optimum level of animal-agricultural production to provide humans with a sustainable supply of animal protein. At the same time, population biopolitics tends to flatten the differences between human and nonhuman by treating humans not as sovereign subjects but as living bodies alongside other living bodies. Soylent Green leverages this displacement of human sovereignty by dislocating cannibalism from its imaginative role as an exemplary signifier for the “uncivilized” pre-modern. Instead, the rediscovery of the edibility of the human body is presented as the necessary corollary of a thoroughly modern discourse of population management, shorn of its vestigial commitment to human exceptionalism.John MillerJohn Miller is a Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Sheffield. His books include Empire and the Animal Body (Anthem, 2012) and (with Louise Miller) Walrus (Reaktion, 2014). He is co-editor of Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, co-director of ShARC (Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre) and Secretary of ASLE-UKI (Association for Study of Literature and the Environment, UK & Ireland). His current book project is a literary history of fur.The Literary Invention of In Vitro MeatProduced by culturing animal tissue in a laboratory cell culture, in vitro meat is drawing an increasing amount of media coverage. While it is still some way from commercial productivity, significant strides are being made towards an innovation that promises to radically alter meat’s relationship to animal liberation and environmental movements. In vitro meat’s promise is meat without suffering, with a greatly diminished ecological footprint and significant potential for addressing global food shortages. At the same time, the prospect of the widespread consumption of cultured flesh has provoked a good deal of disquiet; this is food at its most unnatural, part of a postmodern menu in which any trace of authenticity is lost in a Baudrillardian culinary simulacra. Such concerns about the coming revolution of in vitro meat frequently involve questions of taxonomy: how, exactly, should we categorise it? For Neil Stephens, in vitro meat is ‘as yet undefined ontological object’; the artists Oran Catts and Ionat Zurr (who have worked extensively with cultured flesh) have coined the terms ‘sub-organism’ and ‘semi-living’ to identify this curious emerging substance. This paper investigates the complex affective and philosophical status of cultured flesh by turning to one of its earliest literary representations, Frederick Pohl and Cyril M. Cornbluth’s The Space Merchants (1952), a text which circulates around the monstrous and uncanny figure of Chicken Little, a vast semi-living entity at the centre of a whole economy.Panel 4: Digital imaginationLykke Guanio-UluruLykke Guanio-Uluru is Assistant Professor of Literature at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences and the author of Ethics and Form in Fantasy Literature: Tolkien, Rowling and Meyer (2015), published by Palgrave Macmillan. Dr Guanio-Uluru has published several articles in peer-reviewed international journals. She teaches multiple courses in literature, digital aesthetics and adaptation, and is the editor of the Nordic Journal of Child Lit Aesthetics. Professional affiliations include the Nordic Network of Narrative Studies, the Ethics Programme at the University of Oslo, the research programme Nature in Children’s Literature, ENSCAN and DiGRA, the Digital Games Research Association.Digital media, artist and plant: James Cameron’s Avatar – A Cure for Plant Blindness?Digital media, artist and plant: James Cameron’s Avatar – A Cure for Plant Blindness?John Charles Ryan (2016) notes that “plants constitute the vast majority of the world’s living things” since “the global bio-mass (phytomass) might be one-thousand times greater than animal biomass (zoomass), although estimates are highly variable and measuring techniques unreliable” (41). In contrast to their prevalence, plants gain relatively little cultural attention – perhaps because we simply do not see them. J. H. Wandersee and E. E. Schussler (1999) have conducted extensive research into this phenomenon, labelling the human condition of not seeing and therefore not appreciating plants, as “plant blindness”. An innovative blend of computer generated images and live action filming in stereoscopic 3D, the world’s highest grossing film to date[1], James Cameron’s Avatar, features the vibrant and memorable flora of the alien moon Pandora, rendered with the hyper-reality of computer games’ aesthetics. Drawing on Ryan’s (2016, p. 41) distinction between the extrinsic (plants being acted upon) and intrinsic (plants acting) capacities of plants, this paper analyses the narrative function of plants in Avatar. Discussing the role of plants in relation to Cameron’s new media techniques, the paper asks whether the central role of plants in Avatar combined with their graphically vivid rendering may serve as a cure to ease the human condition of plant blindness, or whether their augmented reality looks make real world plants even less notable in comparison. [1] Not adjusted for inflation. See . Bronwin PatricksonPhD in Computer Game Design from Macquarie University, Sydney Australia.Currently working as an Mobility/Interactive media/Travel Writing researcher and tutor atUniversity of Leeds.Mobilising the Environmental Imagination in Hybrid LandscapesSmartphone technologies are turning landscapes in to blended environments, enriched with GPS enabled data-scapes and the virtually enhanced behaviours of 3D graphical characters.By mediating environmental connectivity these technologies can transform the experience of being in nature to one of virtual distraction, but they can also promote that experience by making it easier to navigate and harder to ignore. The historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch has persuasively shown how technology transforms the experience of bering in nature. In the context of the industrial revolution, he argued that train travel offered a heady cocktail of speed, spectacle, ease and affordability. The tourists aboard these trains that quickly criss-crossed the countryside might have revelled in the passing view, but always from the vantage point of their train windows. During the industrial era it was the train and the rhythm of the wheels on the tracks that filtered the traveller’s experience of the passing countryside. J?rgensen extended this thinking to examine the experience of the natural world in a digital age, where trains may well be classed a slower, more traditional travel option. Digital technologies, by contrast, can make something akin to a close reading of the environment accessible for home viewers via the (surprisingly popular) extended broadcast of footage collected from web cameras attached to slow moving ocean liners, for example. J?rgensen challenged the notion that technology necessarily implies speed, or spark and argued instead that mediation is a way of making connections.Now there are numerous mobile phone applications that also promote independent travel options like driving (using collated, socially reviewed travel guides like Roadtrippers), walking (e.g. the personal tracker MapMyHike, the flora identifier Leafsnap, the virtual treasure hunt network, Geocaching and social networking services for adventure travellers like Yonder), cycling (the fitness tracker, MapMyRide, or Strava, the application that allow athletes in different locations to compete against each other virtually), running (the narrativised running game, Zombies Run!), or simply playing in nature (with the mobile game that challenges players to collect, fight and exchange geolocated, virtual creatures, Pokémon Go).In this paper I explore J?rgensen’s notion of mediation as a process for making connections in light of these sorts of social, location based travel applications. By comparing these popular applications with some of their forerunners created by experimental locative artists, such as Mapping the Commons (2010) which sought to map commonalities of life in Athens, as opposed to place-marks, or the free iphone application WalkSpace that allows users to recreate Bloom’s walks in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses in alternate destinations around the world, I consider what mainstreaming might mean in terms of mobile emplacement within landscape and how creative digital activists might continue to agitate for enchantment, whilst also potentially making environmental care a commonplace context. Dr Bradon SmithBradon Smith is a Research Associate at The Open University, with interests in the representation of climate change and energy in contemporary literature. My doctoral research looked at contemporary popular science writing and representations of science in contemporary British fiction and drama. From 2007-2010 I co-convened the Cultures of Climate Change research group at CRASSH, University of Cambridge. Since then, I have held positions at the Open University, the University of Edinburgh and as an AHRC Knowledge Placement Fellow at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). I am currently working on the AHRC funded Stories of Change project, a part of the cross-council Connected Communities theme, and in particular leading on the Energy Generation strand. A special issue of the journal Resilience, which I am editing with Prof Axel Goodbody, on ‘Stories of Energy: Literary, Historical and Ethnographic Perspectives’ is forthcoming in 2018.Breaking the Grid: computer games as sites of ecological reflectionIn this paper I will argue that computer games have the potential to offer spaces for ecological reflection, critique, and engagement. However, in many computer games, elements of the games’ procedural rhetoric limit this potential. In his account of American foundation narratives, environmental historian David Nye notes that the ‘second-creation’ narratives that he identifies “retain widespread attention [...] children play computer games such as Sim City, which invite them to create new communities from scratch in an empty virtual landscape…a malleable, empty space implicitly organized by a grid” (Nye, 2003). I will begin by showing how grid-based resource management games encode a set of narratives in which nature is the location of resources to be extracted and used. These grids are certainly lines that restrict, rather than enable ecological thought.I will then examine the climate change game Fate of the World (2011), drawing it into comparison with game-like online policy tools such as the UK Department for Energy and Climate Change’s 2050 Calculator, and models such as the environmental scenario generation tool Foreseer. I will argue that while both may be narrowly successful in generating engagement with climate change and resource issues, in other ways their effect may be disempowering: firstly, they emphasise the scale and complexity of environmental problems; secondly, the prioritise technocratic top-down policy responses at the expense of changes on the level of individual behaviour. I then turn to examples of digital games and playing strategies that offer more plural and open-ended engagement with environmental concerns. The on/off-line game World Without Oil (2007) encouraged players to respond to a fictional oil crisis, generating sustained and solution-focussed engagement. Examples of ‘expansive play’ also reveal ecocritical playing strategies in the sandbox-game Minecraft, a game which may initially seem to take the logic of resource extraction to its extreme. Finally, I look at David OReilly’s off-beat game-animation Mountain (2014), which in its unflinching mountain removes the agency of the player, and mocks the ‘nature as resource’ model of the games previously discussed. Instead Mountain invites an ontological reconsideration of the player’s relationship with the non-human.IPanel 5: Aquapelagic poeticsRos Ambler-AldermanRosalind Alderman has recently completed a PhD at Southampton University. Her research explores the concept of the ecosystem in science, popular science, and literature, and focuses on American poets including Lyn Hejinian, Marcella Durand, Juliana Spahr, and the British poet Colin Simms. ‘Things of Each Possible Relation Hashing Against One Another’: Juliana Spahr and the poetry of erosionIn ‘Things of Each Possible Relation Hashing Against One Another’ (2011), the American poet Juliana Spahr invites us ‘to gather, to change, and to consider sea’. In considering the sea throughout her poem Spahr brings to bear a preoccupation with ecological connectedness and complexity. Not only are ideas of the sea and its ecosystems explored within the work, but Spahr's formal choices such as repetition and variation also allow her to model and hence to think through both ecological and linguistic connectedness and contextualisation, hashing, erosion, and growth, in a way that both interrogates and extends the ecological science with which she engages. As Joan Retallack has pointed out, the poem itself ‘adopts nature’s manner of operation (the hashing part)’. Yet at the same time as Spahr draws these deep connections between text and world, she also critiques the analogical and metaphorical patterns of our thinking. This paper explores this dichotomy, asking how Spahr uses a shifting perspective from sea to land to reveal how our representations of the world, whether literary or scientific, construct our notions of the phenomena they purport to describe and so shape our behaviour towards the natural world.Pippa MarlandPippa Marland is a Research Fellow on the 'Land Lines: Modern British Nature Writing' project at the University of Leeds. She is co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge collection Walking, Landscape and Environment and is currently preparing her monograph Ecocritical Island Studies for publication.‘Archipelagic refraction: reading the Docklands through the Western Isles in Stephen Watts' Republic of Dogs / Republic of Birds’Stephen Watts’ experimental prose work Republic of Dogs / Republic of Birds was, according to the notes which preface the main body of the text, "Written late 1980s/ Found 2012/ Typed onto laptop July 2013". The narrative's frequent shifts between London's Isle of Dogs and the Western Isles of Scotland, along with the fragmentary, 'found' nature of the writing, provide a sense of creative slippage between the two landscapes and the characters who inhabit them, and effect a form of internalised archipelagraphy which brings a new dimension to archipelagic and literary island studies. This paper explores the work's deep rooted social-ecological dimension, in which the devastation of working class communities and collective cultural memory which follows the decline of the dockyards and the re-development of the Isle of Dogs during the 1980s is refracted through Watts’ reminiscences of living on the island of North Uist. Throughout the text there is a flexibility to the term ‘island’ such that it sometimes refers to the Isle of Dogs, sometimes to the Scottish Western Isles, sometimes to London, and sometimes to the entire landmass of Great Britain. However, at the heart of this unstable, shifting terminology is a consistent sense of 'island' values – the sense that despite economic hardship in both rural and urban contexts, the ‘island’ stands against the discourses of ‘improving modernity’ and promotes the nurturing of cultural memory and the value of individual human lives.Mandy BloomfieldMandy Bloomfield is a lecturer in English at the University of Plymouth, where she teaches modern and contemporary literature. She is the author of Archaeopoetics: Word, Image, History (University of Alabama Press, 2016) and has published numerous articles on contemporary ecopoetics in journals such as Contemporary Literature, Green Letters?and Critical Quarterly.?‘Oceanic Poetics: All at sea with Charles Olson’This paper explores American post-war poet Charles Olson’s engagement with the sea. Olson looms increasingly large in the histories of avant-garde poetics, and in our present moment his work is being returned to with renewed force in ecopoetic practice and criticism. The presence of the sea in Olson’s thinking and poetics has been noted, but not reflected upon in any sustained way. I will argue that a recalibration of attention to this aspect of his work gives us both a new view of Olson and it also demonstrates the value of emerging ‘blue’ ecologies for ecocritical thinking more widely. I will examine Olson’s ‘oceanic poetics’ in his Maximus Poems. In this long poetic series Olson's engagements with the sea enable an investigation of the long history of 'domination of nature' rooted deep in American culture, and also environmental degradation in his own present moment. But the sea is also an object of philosophical contemplation in this work; Olson values the way that encounters with it provoke epistemological and ontological uncertainty, and a sense of unhomeliness that unsettles both human hubris and too-cosy notions of dwelling. I will also show that the influence of ocean thinking can be detected in his influential ‘open field’ model of poetics. If, as Robert Creeley put it 'form is never more than an extension of content,' then the presence of the sea in Olson's poetic methods might be detected as a shaping force in formal as well as thematic terms.Parallel Panels Session BPanel 1: Landscapes: perceptions and (mis)entanglementsHelen ListA Dud Metaphor – Page onto LandThere is a single spatial construct, the rectangular frame of the page which artists employ, (take artist’s books for example) also designers upon a flat plane, and which within the book is furthermore the essential underpinning to scholarship itself; providing the self-contained backdrop for the flow of text and of our literacy. It is a visual or tactile cross-disciplinary construct in this respect, one which Derrida pins down in his book The Truth in Painting, however in relation to the environment it is not so much a truth as complete falsehood, a dud metaphor and bad translation, one without an application within our understanding of landscape.After all, in the aftermath of a Deleuzian de-territorialisation we might more profitably understand our interaction with environment as the drawing of trajectories through the field of activity, and in the context of a multiple and post-human perspective, perceive ourselves as one player interacting with multiple others – swarms, flocks and vegetation - within this sphere. However this paper is interested in working against the grain, in exploring the very falsehood, the transfer of an inappropriate construct, the isolating boundaries of the frame, that are derived from another field of our intellectual and creative activity. The suspicion is that this framing metaphor is found more frequently hidden within our understanding of our environment than our intended affirmations would allow. Hence the inter-disciplinary emphasis of this 2017 ASLE-UKI conference provides an opportunity for drawing out and questioning the applications of such a framing. In approaching the task, the paper will draw upon a localized case-study of the division and ownership of land, the means by which it is subject to property law and to management in situ. It will also examine the patterns of land-use, agricultural, commercial and residential which are in operation here. Evidence from a human geographical and legal framework is thus reviewed in the light of those expectations set up within the spatial constructs of the literary and intellectual framing model. In the creative environment the frame is the arbiter of an absolute freedom that operates within its ruling lines, yet in the material environment it is a fragile and mutable reminder of our limitations. The paper will seek to draw out and explore the elements of this disjuncture.Andrew JeffreyI am a practice based Creative Writing PhD candidate at Sheffield Hallam University writing about encounters with non-human animals in particular landscapes. Recent poems have appeared in ‘Matter’, ‘Route 57’ and ‘Plumwood Mountain Review: An Australian Journal of Ecopoetics’ and I have had work exhibited at the Millenium Galleries in Sheffield. I have written book reviews for ‘The Goose’ and am a peer reviewer for ‘The Dovetail Journal’. I teach hybrid critical/creative Literature/Creative Writing undergraduate modules on Experimental Writing and Literature and the Environment. I previously worked in a Sustainable Development role. My blog is: cowyidentity.Moss Valley EntanglementsFor the past year I have been visiting The Moss Valley in Sheffield on a weekly basis to write on site, concentrating on writing about the non-human animals I have encountered. Moss Valley is part of Sheffield's green belt, containing Ancient Woodland classed as a Site of Special Scientific Interest; it is also used as a site for agriculture, permaculture and animal husbandry and is part of the area designated as suitable for fracking. As such it is a site characterised by a number of competing discourses: environmental, scientific, economic, managerial and political.I will present and perform writing which uses open form poetry, found text, poetics, journal entries and literary criticism; it works with spatial layout to ensure that each genre of writing is visibly entangled by encounters with other discourses and genre. The layout enables the writing to explore The Moss Valley as a site of processual encounter as well as allowing contestation of the various discourses which aim to delimit and control the site. It also aims to encourage the reader to be involved in the generation of meaning by connecting with the text in different ways, giving a sense of the writing’s involvement in wider cultural meanings.The poetry consists of writing relating to particular animal encounters that also draw upon found text. Literary criticism considers the work of Colin Simms, Maggie O Sullivan and Helen MacDonald. Poetics considers the writing’s relationship to ecocriticism, projective verse, discourses concerning the site and Animal Studies. The entanglement of these strands generate the tension which results in the creation of further new work, I aim to disclose this process and involve the reader in it. Joanne Lee Joanne Lee is Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design at Sheffield Hallam University. She is an artist, writer and publisher of the Pam Flett Press, a serial publication essaying aspects of everyday life. The Pam Flett Press has appeared in PROGR-Fest, PROGR - Zentrum für Kulturproduktion, Bern, Switzerland; Offprint, Tate Modern and KALEID London, an exhibition showcasing the best books by European-based artists. Rosemary ShirleyRosemary Shirley is a Senior Lecturer in Art Theory and Practice at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research centres on everyday life and visual cultures, with a particular emphasis on rural contexts. She is interested in how the English landscape can be explored through discourses of modernity. This has led her to write about topics as diverse as litter, motorways, folk customs, scrapbooks and the Women’s Institute. Six Stories about LitterWith its multiple causes, varied material substance, persistent mobility and enduring legacy, litter is a subject to which the terms Cross Multi Inter Trans readily apply. It is – literally – hard to pin down, and as such necessitates an approach in which shifting forms of attention are enabled through the application of critical lenses from different disciplinary traditions. Across the last year we have been developing an on-going research dialogue about the litter that affects the locations in which we live – a Peak District village on the commuter rail line into Manchester, and a Sheffield suburb where the urban frays into amenity woodland. Drawing upon our backgrounds in art practice, art history, design, cultural and discard studies, and a particular conceptual focus on ‘the everyday’ in rural and urban contexts, we have variously pursued individual archival research, gathered the user comments from local news sites and forums, walked alone and together, journeyed to fly-tipping hotspots and abandoned waste transfer stations, photographed our regular commutes, picked litter, and come together to talk through our critical studies and practical experiences. Our larger project is concerned with the multiple ways such material is generated, how it is and might be ‘read’, and what/how it signifies to those who create or subsequently encounter it. It attends to the microcosm of specific local sites as a means of approaching larger global contexts. For the conference we propose a creative-critical panel in the form of a walk through which six stories will be told about litter. It begins with – and re-enacts – the phenomenon of World War II ‘litter trails’, when enemy communications were discerned in the scattered materials found across the English countryside. It continues with the distribution of a printed broadside pamphlet itemising comments on local news reports about litter for the anxieties they reveal about ‘foreignness’. A bin is used to reflect on the creation of the Keep Britain Tidy campaign. Experiences of poo bags discarded by dog walkers produces a lexicon of nouns and verbs for the practice, and poetry of a sort. Stephen Willats’ art practice considers ways in which littered paths problematise questions of land ownership/custodianship. Finally, drawing and photography describe the anti-aesthetic of shattered, slumping, soggy rubbish met with on pavements during daily journeys to work. The 30-minute walk will use rooms/spaces in proximity to the conference venue (since we are based locally the route can be researched and prepared in advance): we are keen to keep thinking very literally in motion. The conference context will enable us to essay (in the sense of being a trial, test or experiment) a constellation of ideas through narration and theoretical analysis, and in the form of visual, verbal and oral artefacts; we will end in a location where we can have 20 minutes dialogue with those who have walked with us. In recognition of the conference theme and the multiplicity of our inquiry, this presentation seeks to produce complexity, in order to accord littered landscapes the richly creative-critical possibilities they require.Panel 2: Chartered watersSimon ReadSimon Read is an artist and Associate Professor of Fine Art at Middlesex University London. Over recent years he has combined his position as a senior academic with an understanding of coastal dynamics derived from his way of life to foster a discussion on an interdisciplinary and international basis between academics, engineers, government agency officers, politicians and local communities upon the vital importance of understanding the cultural implications of environmental change.?Aside from being actively engaged in Suffolk upon estuary management schemes, he is currently working upon a number of research programmes including Hydrocitizenship, a national project funded by AHRC to explore the contemporary relationship between communities and water, and CoastWEB, a project funded by NERC, led by Plymouth Marine Laboratory to use locations on the Welsh Coast in a study of the community benefits of a healthy intertidal saltmarsh environment.Diverse communities, familiar territory: Conflict and congruency over natural resource management This year I was invited to contribute to a research project CALCNR (Community based adaptive learning in management of conflicts and natural resources in Bangladesh and Nepal) exploring ways to mitigate conflict over water resources caused by changing weather patterns as a result of climate change. My role is to launch an arts initiative to reflect upon the achievements with teams of artists in both countries and to continue to have an overview until the completion of the project in November 2017. Although this may seem exotic, in truth my direct input was limited to two days in each country, which included a formal briefing on the case study sites and their associated problems, discussing the role of the arts in the projects, meeting the arts teams, briefing them and making a case study site visit. As with many interdisciplinary projects, it is often assumed by a partnership that the role of the arts is to package the research in a way that makes it more digestible, whereas in truth it is certain to have a more parallel existence. For this presentation I will discuss my approach to this project and put it into the context of other projects that I have been conducting closer to home on the East Anglian Coast. I will discuss similarities and equivalence, not only in the social dynamic of conflicting interests, but also in how communities organize themselves to overcome them. It is encouraging that similar conclusions are reached in widely dissimilar communities facing natural challenges that threaten social stability, reassuring me that whatever I may learn from one geographic environment, can provide lessons in another. Judith Tucker Judith Tucker is an artist and academic, her work explores the meeting of social history, personal memory and geography; it investigates their relationship through drawing, painting and scholarly writing. She is senior lecturer in the School of Design at the University of Leeds. She has exhibited widely both in the UK and abroad. Recent exhibition venues include London, Sheffield, Cambridge and many other regional galleries throughout the UK, and further afield Brno, Czech Republic, Vienna, Austria, Minneapolis and Virginia USA and Yantai, Nanjing and Tianjin in China. She is co-convener of the Land2 and of Mapping Spectral Traces networks and is part of Contemporary British Painting, a platform for contemporary painting in the UK. Tucker also writes academic essays which can be found in academic journals and in books published by Rodopi, Macmillan, Manchester University Press, Intellect and Gunter Narrverlag, Tübingen. Harriet TarloHarriet Tarlo is a poet and academic with an interest in landscape, place and environment. Her publications include Field; Poems 2004-2014; Poems 1990-2003 (Shearsman 2016, 2014, 2004); Nab (etruscan 2005) and, with Judith Tucker, Sound Unseen and behind land (Wild Pansy, 2013 and 2015). She is editor of The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry (Shearsman, 2011) and special poetry editor for Plumwood Mountain 4:2 (2017) . Critical work appears in volumes by Salt, Palgrave, Rodopi and Bloodaxe and in Pilot, Jacket, English and the Journal of Ecocriticism. Her collaborative work with Tucker has shown at galleries including the Catherine Nash Gallery Minneapolis, 2012; Musee de Moulages, Lyon, 2013; Southampton City Art Gallery 2013-14; The Muriel Barker Gallery, Grimsby and the New Hall College Art Collection, Cambridge, 2015. She is a Reader in Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University.“cut banks out”: working on unnavigable watersThe Louth Navigation was constructed between 1765 and 1770 and runs for just over eleven miles. Like many rural canals, the Navigation began to decline towards the end of the Nineteenth Century as roads and railways were developed. The final straw was the devastating flood at Louth in 1920, an event for which the town is known. In 1924 the canal closed and began to fall into slow dereliction. Do canals remain canals when they no longer carry crafts and goods? How might deep mapping techniques, drawing and writing poetry address some of the ambiguities and complexities of this unnavigable water? Walking, drawing and writing along the canal we observed plants, birds and animals creating homes in and amongst the old culverts, bridges and locks. An unplanned re-wilding has begun. Human life and human interventions also continue along the canal of course: farming, fishing, and water management making for a landscape full of criss-crossing lines of water, running parallel and intersecting with energy lines carrying gas, oil and electricity above and below land.Walking and working along urban canals is something that has long been favoured by many psychogeographically informed artists and writers such as Will Self, Iain Sinclair, Laura Oldfield Ford and Juliette Losq. What is significantly different here is that the Louth canal traverses through largely agricultural land; rather than being on the edges of an urban conurbation we are on the edges of fens, farms and fields and of the Eastern edge U.K. itself. Canals are beloved of those who consider them as key edgeland sites, how much might it be useful to consider the Louth canal in this way? The Navigation offers us a more than an edgeland view, it offers more than a nostalgic trace of bygone industry, it offers us a snapshot of the complex, entangled relation of past, present, local and global, through a hodgepodge of footpaths, waterways, cycle paths, over grown concrete, graffiti, bridges, windmills and pylons, oil pipes in contrast to the wildlife over the marshes, networks of paths under expansive skies. Defying obvious boundaries and binary ways of thinking about art and poetry, our collaborative works are experiential, both more and less than descriptive, both more and less than topographical. In our work, we explore not only the visual and textual potential of this place, but also the past, present and possible futures of the Navigation, matters we have discussed with local inhabitants when showing the work on the east coast. Our work as artists is not to be nostalgic or didactic, but to reflect what we see here, to add our own lines, written and drawn, to these pre-existent lines, to take creative transects (as the canal is a transect) through the many lives, the full biota, of fen and river, canal and haven. This line of water cut through land that reminds us that the idea of industrial urbanisation as romantic antithesis to the innocence of the countryside is so often more subtly differentiated. Our own lines can be seen in the In the Open exhibition in the SIA gallery site.Zoe Skoulding Zo? Skoulding has published four full-length collections of poetry, including Remains of a Future City (Seren, 2008), and The Museum of Disappearing Sounds (Seren, 2013). Her most recent work is Teint, a sequence on a lost Parisian river, the Bièvre (Hafan Books, 2016). Her monograph Contemporary Women's Poetry and Urban Space: Experimental Cities was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2013, and she was editor of the international quarterly Poetry Wales 2008-2014. She is Reader in the School of English Literature at Bangor University.Janette Kerr Dr Janette Kerr RWA RSAhons, p/t visiting research fellow with UWE Bristol. A painterdrawn to peripheries of land, her work considers physical and meteorological extremesand instabilities, reflecting immersive experience of walking/observing changing land/seascape. She seeks to imbed herself in specific landscapes and historical cultures, focusing on heritage of relationships with land and sea (fishing industry, stories, livedrealities). Breadth of engagement allows her work to develop in cross-disciplinarydirections and she has shown widely in the UK and abroad. Janette has organised symposia and curated exhibitions such as The Power of the Sea at the RWA, Bristol. She has had residencies in the UK, Norway and more recently the High Arctic.Jo MillettJo Millett is an artist with a particular interest in temporal experience and the relationship between memory and location/situation and the (dis)connections between sound and image. Her work often takes the form of installations using film, video and sound. She has shown widely through the UK and beyond, and has been involved with artist groups and art projects, working with other artists in commissioning,distributing, and exhibiting work as well as education and training projects. In 2014 she was awarded a practice-based PhD with a thesis on materiality and senses of past in moving image. She is currently based in Sheffield.Confusing shadow with substanceConfusing shadow with substance is a project which took place this summer and explores the slippage between memory and understanding, and the interplay between past and present in a particular place - Stenness, Northmavine, a site of one of Shetland’s busiest former fishing stations. Our focus was on far haaf (deep sea) fishing which took place on Shetland during the 18th and 19th centuries. Both artists - Janette Kerr, a painter, and Jo Millett, a moving image and sound artist -have coinciding interests in the sea and a mutual interest in location, memory and materiality. Our collaboration, as two artists coming together from different art disciplines, will be explored. We will discuss working with with local museums, archives and the residents living in the area around Stenness, whose contributions by chance or by design became part of the work.We will consider the complex relationship between history, memory and making; and the senses of physicality of land, sea and human activity that the work suggests. The shoreline at Stenness, between the land and far haaf, became a place for imagining and invention; where an interaction between that which is gone, that which remainsand that which drifts between, can take place. The result of this work is a three screen video and sound installation, looping continuously, creating spatial and temporal connections and disjunctures, navigating between distance and nearness, permanence and transience.The presentation will include extracts from the art installation – ‘Confusing shadow with substance’ – first shown at Shetland Museum, Lerwick, in Summer 2017.Panel 3: Pastorals: landscapes of transhumancePaolo PalladinoPaolo Palladino is Professor of History and Theory in the Department of History at Lancaster University. He currently holds a Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellowship in the Department of History and Theory of International Relations at the at the University of Groningen, and is working on a project relating to sheep, wool, landscape and connectivity.Annalisa ColombinoAnnalisa Colombino is Assistant Professor at the Department of Geography and Regional Sciences at the University of Graz, Austria. She received her PhD in human geography at the Open University, working on the geographies of place marketing. Her current research interests bring together food studies and more-than-human biopolitics as she is looking at transhumance in Europe. She has published at the intersection of alternative food networks and animal geographies. Her most recent works include ‘Dead Liveness/Living Deadness Thresholds of Non-Human Life and Death in Biocapitalism’ (with P. Giaccaria); ‘Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2016’; and ‘BREED CONTRA BEEF - The Making of Piedmontese Cattle’ in Emel J. and Neo H. Political Ecologies of Meat, 2015. She is currently working on two academic publications (invited) to introduce the ‘animal turn’ in the Italian geographical debate. She is co-leader with Ulrich Ermann of the project “(Un-)knowing Food”, funded by the Styrian Government, Austria.Centaurs and Transhumance: On movement and modes of being togetherThis panel brings together historians, artists, geographers, theorists and literary scholars interested in the pastoral practice of transhumance: from the Italian transumanza, ‘crossing the land’, the term describes the movement of peoples and animals across cultural landscapes, political boundaries and ecological biomes. What is the status of the traditional twice-yearly migration for fresh pasture today? What is a flock of sheep, a docile collectivity or an innumerable swarm? How does transhumance help us to think about nomadic and/or posthuman mobility in terms of, but also against, the theoretical deployments of these concepts? Where do traditional human practices meet the limits of nonhuman life-worlds, and how might they be justly reconciled? This panel seeks to address these far-reaching questions across French, Spanish, Italian, British and North-American ‘naturalcultural’ landscapes in which transhumance is still, or has been, practised. Paolo Palladino and Annalisa Colombino, ‘Centaurs and Transhumance: Mobility, Identity and Bio-politics’. This paper focuses on TransHumance, a theatrical performance that the Thé?tre du Centaure created in 2013, for the celebrations of Marseille as European Capital of Culture. It articulates a genealogy of the manifesto that was issued as part of this performance, tying it to both post-humanist investment in mobility and the transgression of all fixed identity, and a more traditional understanding of pastoralism as the repository of French national identity. Transhumance thus serves as a site of critical reflection on contemporary bio-political thought. Julia Tanner, ‘Post-humanising the Pastoral: Sweetgrass’s Swarming Sheep’. What happens when a flock of sheep numbers not dozens but thousands, and when this mass is moving through a landscape so vast that they look no larger than flecks of cotton? Such is the question raised by Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s and Ilisa Barbash’s film Sweetgrass (Castaing-Taylor and Barbash 2009), an ethnographic film of the last transhumant sheep drive across the Absaroka-Beartooth mountains. It is this paper’s contention that Sweetgrass post-humanises the pastoral by rendering this most anthropocentric of modes ‘swarmic’, revealing the power relations and violence at its heart. Fernando García Dory, ‘Cultural Reflections on Pastoralism’. How does art reframe and reposition cultural understandings of pastoralist forms of life? This contribution will consider artistic practice where it interacts with ‘agri-culture’, from the Shepherds’ School (founded in Asturias, 2004) and organising a European Shepherds’ Network (2012) for Documenta 13, to launching and coordinating a World Alliance of Indigenous Nomads. It will also offer an insight into more recent work in Bolzano, Alpine Italy, where artists and local stakeholders collectively generate, through the organisation INLAND, speculations on possible futures for pastoralism. Julia TannerJulia Tanner recently returned from a fellowship at Harvard University’s Visual and Environmental Studies Department and is now completing her PhD in ethnographic film and poetry at the School of English at the University of Leeds. Julia’s thesis investigates the aesthetics of the swarm and the ethics of perception in the works of three creative artists who are based at Harvard: the poet Jorie Graham and collaborators at the Sensory Ethnography Lab, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel.Post-humanising the Pastoral: Sweetgrass’s swarming sheepDan EltringhamDan Eltringham is a researcher and poet. He recently completed his PhD thesis at Birkbeck College, University of London, entitled ‘Tracking the Commons: Pastoral, Enclosure and Commoning in J. H. Prynne and William Wordsworth’. He has completed Visiting Fellowships at the John Ryland Research Institute, University of Manchester (2017) and at the School of Global Environmental Sustainability, Colorado State University (2015), where he contributed towards the research network ‘Learning from the Land’. He has critical work forthcoming on Peter Larkin and Peter Riley, and recent poetry has appeared in journals including Plumwood Mountain, Colorado Review, E-Ratio, Datableed, Blackbox Manifold, The Goose, The Clearing, Intercapillary Space and Alba Londres 6: Contemporary Mexican Poetry. His first poetry collection, Cairn Almanac, will be published by Hesterglock Press in 2017. He co-edits Girasol Press and co-runs Electric Arc Furnace, a new poetry readings series in Sheffield.‘Breeze, or Bird, or fleece of Sheep’: Pastoral propagation and traditional ecological knowledge in Wordsworth’s CumbriaPastoral Propagation and Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Wordsworth’s Cumbria’. William Wordsworth’s ‘Grasmere Pastorals’, this paper argues, voice a materialist ecological poetics of nonhuman propagation and distribution that counters the anthropocentric assumption that the pastoral flock, enumerated and cared for, is only an analogy for human demographics. Secondly, the concept of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (borrowed from ecology) suggests that Wordsworth’s shepherd figures, far from being idealised types, exercise a ground-level vernacular epistemology that roots them in the social-ecological dynamics of their human-nonhuman community.Carol WattsCarol Watts is a poet whose practice includes site specific work, drawing, sound and other media, sometimes in collaboration. Her sequence Zeta Landscape, responding to the landscape and husbandry of sheep on a Welsh hill farm, was anthologised in part in The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry. Her most recent poetry collections include Sundog (Veer Books) and Dockfield (Equipage), and she is currently exploring inundation and immunologics, where the south downs meet Brighton's Kemptown. She is Head of the School of English at Sussex University.Occupations of PastoralPanel 5: World ProcessingLuce ChoulesI am interested in an environmental shift in human nature. My arts practice explores ideas of change in landscape identity, and ecosystems within cultural tourism, through physical and emotional geography. My concepts are rooted in poetic and academic research, and use methodologies of experimental fieldwork and itinerant working to witness and survey a human presence in natural environments – our habitats of the future. I am a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), affiliate of the RHUL Centre for the GeoHumanities, Founder and coordinator of itinerant artist network TSOEG (Temporal School of Experimental Geography), and present a series of presentations and papers on the subject of fieldwork in artistic practice. Guide 74: A mountain recording activityGuide74 is an artist project exploring spatial dynamics in the Chamonix valley, Mont-Blanc massif and Aiguilles Rouges using experimental fieldwork and documentation. Collaboration within the project is less about individuals working within specialisms and more a dialogue between two subjects – natural science and fine art practice – where the collaboration is realised through the work itself. The output of this work combines a poetic narrative script and a large collection of projected photographic images, with selected readings from Alpine literature and Geomorphology. The aim is to create a series of live performance lectures that witness and reference elements and details of the Alpine ecosystem of the Haute-Savoie in France, through physical and emotional geography. For the Cross/Multi/Inter/Trans conference, I will focus my presentation on the subject of coexistence – an interrelation of conflux systems within a mountain environment. Guide74 aims to present an alternative view of this activity by exploring ideas of concurrence in the mountain landscape, interwoven pathways and watercourses, and the flow and supply of natural and commercial resources – a mountain microcosm engaged in a continuous recording of the human activity upon it. Through an ongoing dialogue between the behaviour and influence of tourism, and the observation of systems at play in leisure and conservation, Guide74 invites an audience to consider the mountain perspective. Samantha WaltonI am an AHRC ECR Leadership Fellow on the project Cultures of Nature and Wellbeing: Connecting Health and the Environment through Literature (2016-2018). In 2016, I was an Environmental Humanities Research Fellow at IASH, The University of Edinburgh, and from 2015-2017 I held a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award and follow-on funding for the project Landscaping Change. I co-edit the ASLE-UKI journal, Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism.Cultures of Nature and Wellbeing: Narratives of sustainability and green healthcareThe connection between human wellbeing and the natural environment is a pervasive theme in 20th and 21st century literature. However, there has been no significant scholarship that addresses nature-wellbeing connections in modern writing.In my current research project I examine literature that reflects on human-nature relations at several key moments between 1914 and the present day. This paper will present an overview of the preliminary findings of this research, beginning with an analysis of post-WW1 accounts of warfare as devastating to nature and the human (Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier; Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song; Nan Shepherd, The Weatherhouse) and concluding with a discussion of New Nature Writing focused on relations between local environments and the mental health of the author (Richard Mabey, Nature Cures; Helen MacDonald, H is for Hawk; Jean Sprackland, Strands).This latter period corresponds with the rise of ‘green care’ approaches in health and the growth of scientific studies of nature-wellbeing relations. Green care has emerged in the context of worsening environmental crisis, which environmentalists have linked to (amongst other factors) disconnection from first-hand experiences of nature. In order to address this disconnection, the UK charity The Wildlife Trusts has launched a campaign for a Nature and Wellbeing Act, which would enshrine the protection of nature in law. At the present moment, they are seeking to form a scientific evidence base to support their campaign. My research addresses this policy context, and asks whether literary studies may offer ways of extending, reformulating, problematising or critiquing the characteristic construction of the nature-wellbeing relationship within green care policy discourse and nascent green care legislation.While extensive research into environmental factors in illness and healing has been conducted in social and scientific fields, environmental humanities scholars have been sceptical about the common-sense assumption that nature is healing, or indeed that ‘nature’ can be used as an unproblematic term for defining the non-human. Indeed, within environmentalist discourse and psychological research, ‘nature’ is frequently named but rarely adequately defined. For example, the current UK campaign for a Nature and Wellbeing Act depends on the formation of an evidence base linking contact with healthy ecosystems and living nature to human wellbeing, and yet medical studies also suggest that simulated natural sounds and scenery can improve patient recovery time and experiences of pain in equivalent levels to ‘real’ nature. As economic and environmental efficiency drives take place in tandem in the NHS in an era of austerity, decisions that concern the ‘value’ of nature become increasingly fraught.The paper will therefore address the conference themes by examining the meaning of ‘nature’ in academic and medical discourses pertinent to green care and nature-wellbeing research. When such complex and ambiguous terms as ‘nature’ and ‘wellbeing’ are at stake, what are the obstacles to interdisciplinary work, and how can the environmental humanities help foster cross-disciplinary understanding and collaboration?Dr Edwina fitzPatrickDr Edwina fitzPatrick is a U.K. based artist, independent researcher, and educator. Her artwork engages with site and context and her practice-based Arts and Humanities Research Council funded PhD involved working with the United Kingdom’s Forestry Commission. She is the Course Leader of the MFA Fine Art course at Wimbledon College of Arts, which is part of the University of the Arts London. As such she is fascinated by the systems and ecologies of a place whether it is a managed forest, an archive, a gallery or an art school. Websites: The witnessed and mediated ‘natural’ environment in remote regionsThe witnessed and mediated ‘natural’ environment proposes a fusion between a performance, provocation, and illustrated paper. It involves a highly scripted performance in the form of a quasi lecture, with pre-recorded video interruptions taking place behind the presenter – sometimes agreeing with her scripted opinion, sometime not. Sometimes, both virtual and actual contributors will play devil’s advocate. These collaborative contributions are from writers, scientists and artists that the presenter has already collaborated with, who engage with the now contested term of the Anthropocene. The presenter will form a broad framework, which is then structured, re-defined and re-aligned in response to the collaborators video comments. All participants have creative and critical input to the final presentation. The presentation deliberately combines quite literally mediated (the video) and witnessed (the performance) aspects, reflecting its subject matter. As few of us have been to the Polar Regions or to the depth of the seas or deserts, the presentation considers the proximity of remote environments and the biodiversity that they support, and how we engage with, and witness them. Some of the collaborators have. What might happen when we shift from being a spectator into a witness, because what is happening in front of our eyes is an actuality, not a media representation? As critical writer, James Polchin states, ‘The word witness, as we have come to define it in the latter half of the twentieth century, is more readily equated with the experiences of surviving trauma, investing the act of witnessing with an ethical responsibility.... to witness, especially in the context of historical visual documents, demands not only a speaking, but a speaking out’. So when you are witness to something, you become implicated in it.This is contrasted with mediated, and media-based (mis)understandings of remote regions and artworks sited or originating there. So much footage about them comes to us through the Internet or TV – it is distanced, so we are able to switch off – literally and metaphorically. Alternatively, the actual artwork there becomes superseded and replaced by its representations/mediations.Dr Camilla Nelson Dr Camilla Nelson is a British language artist and researcher based in south west England. She has a PhD in Performance Writing and her work explores the intersection of human and other-than human organisms and environments in page-based poetry, installation and performance. Her current focus is Reading Movement, a series of movement language solo and collaborative works, whose script was long-listed for The Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers in 2016. Her first full poetry collection, Apples & Other Languages (Knives Forks and Spoons), long-listed for the Melita Hume Poetry Prize in 2015, is out now. Camilla is founding editor of Singing Apple Press, a small independent press that produces hand-crafted, limited edition poem-prints, books and other objects. She is associate researcher for RANE (Research in Art, Nature & Environment).World Processing: human and other-than-human language production as a mode of perception in Translating the Coal ForestsTranslating the Coal Forests (2015) is a collaborative bookwork created by Steven Hitchins and Camilla Nelson. Hitchins copied pages of F. J. North’s Coal and the Coalfields in Wales (1931) and suffused them with mud and silt and left them to deteriorate in a South Wales coalfield swamp. After a couple of weeks the remaining text was retrieved. Hitchins used OCR text recognition programs to take casts or moulds of this remaining text. He then sent these translations to Nelson. Both Hitchins & Nelson worked on the remaining letter combinations delivered by coal swamp decay and text processing software to create their own ‘translations’ or ‘transformations’. Nelson pulped and reformed the material remains of the coalfield swamp texts into new pages. Hitchins then printed the dual translations onto transparent pages and arranged them to sit side by side in recto/verso arrangement for comparative consumption, overlaying the coalfield texts’ remains. The intersect and overlay of digital and material texts manifest the palimpsest process of construction. The text forms: steadily, dimity. Translating the Coal Forests (2015) manifests a process of material, digital and interpersonal translation. This paper discusses the construction of Translating the Coal Forests (2015) in relation to Peeter Torop’s account of translation as a process of draft-making, of translating one text into another, in any form (or combination) of textual, metatextual, intertextual, or extratextual translation. Torop references Robin Allott’s claim that ‘semiosis in some sense is perception’ (1994, own emphasis), leading him to talk of the ‘perceptual unity’ of human culture (2003:280). This reading of the perceptual nature of translation coincides with Maturana and Varela’s view of cognition: […] every act of knowing brings forth a world […] All doing is knowing and all knowing is doing […] this bringing forth of a world manifests itself in all our actions and all our being […] there is no discontinuity between what is social and what is human and their biological roots. The phenomenon of knowing is all of one piece […]. (1987:26-27) The perceptual unity of human culture is ‘of one piece’ with what is perceived to be other-than human by virtue of this infinite process of exchange between and within organisms and environments. Human perception is made up of, or supported by, the ‘distributed’ perceptual exchange between media that Torop dubs the ‘infinite process of total translation’ (2003: 271). Torop is particularly thinking about the production of human culture, but this process of translation does not stop, and cannot be stopped, at the margins of what is considered to be human culture (if such a boundary is even clearly discernible). This paper uses the construction of Translating the Coal Forests (2014) to suggest that this continuous process of textual, metatextual, intertextual and extratextual translation describes the way in which human perception is continually informed and constituted by the other-than human in its world/word-making.Parallel Panels Session CPanel 1: Artists’ books and mappingLaura Donkers Laura Donkers is an artist based on the Isle of North Uist. She is a PhD candidate at Duncan of Jordanstone at the University of Dundee, where she also received her MFA in Art, Society and Publics. Her research is entitled ‘Considering local experiential knowledge through ‘slow residency’ artistic actions, aiming at ecological change’. She graduated from Moray College UHI with a BA (Hons) in Art in 2011. She is the director of Earth | Environmental Art Hebrides. Most recently she was Artist-in-Residence at DRAWinternational in Caylus, Mid-Pyrennes Regions, France. Over the past year, her practice has been located in New Zealand. She is a member of PLaCE International (UK).Jan JohnsonJan Johnson holds an MFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design. In 2010, she was awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Drawing. She was a Fulbright Scholar at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design at University of Dundee in 2015-16, with her project, “On Stitching in Scotland: Stories, Schemes and Contingencies of a Gendered Material Practice.” Johnson is a Part-time Professor of Practice at Clark University in Worcester, MA, and is also the coordinator of the International Summer Art Experience at DJCAD. Her work has been shown throughout the US, and internationally in Greece and the UK. She is a member of PLaCE International (UK).The Mutable Book: Intra-Leaving & Sewing WildflowersBorrowing leaves out of nature’s book, Laura Donkers and Jan Johnson cross over the form of book through the performative nature of intra-actions. Using tissue and thin skins of paper and cloth, they re-tell a narrative using touch to inscribe marks onto a surface page, enfolding matter and meaning. As interdisciplinary artists conducting place-based research, they read and respond to the environment with a text of nature writing and ecopoetry. They propose a collaborative panel presentation of their work as mutable open books. From their respective discipline camps, they traverse boundaries, remake borders and entangle edges and surfaces from above and below. Laura Donkers employs frottage as a kind of mirroring of the hand and the object, in which there is a separation and revealing of subject and object over time. Similarly Jan Johnson’s sewing, embroidery and lacemaking mirror the hand and mind, subject and object as an entanglement always already becoming. The notion of text is embedded in marks that favor biosemiotics over words. Their slow method of understanding landscape, place and environment intersects with environmental attitudes, activism and policy. An attempt at Posthuman is instead a collaboration of makers, human and non-human, that brings poetic insights on nature, culture and ethics. Laura Donkers will bring insight into her process of “bookmaking” from her intra-actions with trees and lawnmowers in the Okuti Valley Reserve to those with antique dealers and their reference books. She considers the apparatus for writing/drawing and the performative methodology required for the book’s becoming. Jan Johnson explores the experience of travel to particular edges and interiors in Scotland and to Aegina, Greece. She examines its impact on her practice: from inspiration for being in particular landscapes; planning and the journey process; the role of the journey and not knowing; materials and responding to found matter; intra-actions with kopaneli makers and haptic textile technology, and the body in relationship to labour, speed and time. Elizabeth-Jane BurnettElizabeth-Jane Burnett’s poetry includes: oh-zones (Knives Forks and Spoons), Rivering (Oystercatcher) and Swims (Penned in the Margins, forthcoming 2017). Criticism includes: A Social Biography of Contemporary Innovative Poetry Communities – The Gift, Poethics and the Wager (New York: Palgrave, forthcoming 2017). A reviewer for the US journal The Constant Critic, she studied English at Oxford and Royal Holloway, London, and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Newman University. Her forthcoming book, A Dictionary of the Soil, is supported by Penguin/Random House’s WriteNow scheme. She has spoken about the soil and read from her Dictionary on BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking. Rebecca ThomasIn 2005 Rebecca Thomas completed a Doctorate in Fine Art at the University of East London, having previously studied at St Martins School of Art (1987-1990) and Birkbeck College, University of London, where she completed a postgraduate diploma in Arts Management in 2000. Rebecca has exhibited her paintings and video works widely, most recently at the Politis Gallery in Nicosia, Cyprus (Against Lethe, 2013) and at the Mile End Art Pavilion, London (The Geographical Self, 2012), East Street Arts, Leeds (Close to Home), and taken part in a range of publicly funded projects and academic conferences throughout the UK and abroad, notably at the Universities of Coventry, Dundee, Leeds and Southampton City Art Gallery.She is a member of Print to the People, a printmaking co-operative in Norwich, and is currently working on a series of artist’s books. Field Notes / Field StudyWe are interested in exploring the potential for an Art book to explore both narrative sequence and mapping. Our collaboration uses mapping as a practical starting point for articulating three fields in Devon, operating both metaphorically and visually, involving different stages of drawing, writing, performing and imagining.The fields we are “mapping” are located in the Devon village of Ide and are called “Drewshill 1, 2 and 3” on a sketch map drawn by the writer’s father, showing field names near the Dunchideock (a neighbouring village) boundary. The map appears in his book, A History of the People and Parish of Ide, along with a discussion of the etymological history of these fields as meaning “the fields of the Druid.” The writer is interested in whether the fields hold memories and how these might be accessed through historical research, engagement with organisms present in the field today, and through imaginative and performative processes. These ideas and fields are also being explored in her work-in-progress A Dictionary of the Soil.The artist is interested in drawing while walking in the field, constantly making marks whilst moving. Using oil pastels or other mediums she records, physically and literally the movement of the body through space. This record is affected by many contingent features: her own body’s internal and external movements, her shifting perception as she moves through space, the awkward fluidity of the medium being used and various other features such as temperature and terrain, atmosphere and the general ambience of the place that she is in. She is interested in working with a writer, with a view to exploring the relationship between this physical mark making and language in the conventional sense of the word.Our paper will be a creative discussion of our processes, with a focus on conversation as collaboration. Panel 2: DelugeTara Gulwell I am from South Wales and (will be by the time) a final year undergraduate at the University of East Anglia studying American literature, with a focus on ecocriticism and African American studies. I (will have) recently arrived back in the UK from a year living, studying and researching in New Orleans, Louisiana. I plan on continuing my studies in postgraduate work, in particular exploring relationships to nonhuman environments in African American writing. I also write for online magazine ‘The Norwich Radical’ where I mainly cover Welsh, American and environmental politics.A Hurricane Named Katrina: Reimagining Nature in a Deconstructed CityscapeOn 29th August 2005 Hurricane Katrina rolled into the Gulf Coast and decimated much of the region. The subsequent levee failures in New Orleans, Louisiana, created the most catastrophic American environmental crisis this century has so far seen. Yet the environmental humanities, ecocriticism in particular, has been slow in responding to Katrina. This project aims to remedy that omission. As the consequences of climate change and environmental degradation continue to deteriorate, understanding cultural responses to acute natural disasters will be paramount to the future of studying literature and the environment in the twenty-first century. Through a synthesised analysis of the non-fiction essay collection Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?, the most circulated contemporary photographs and local art collected from a year of primary research in the city, I investigate the role of a destroyed urban landscape in representing trauma and vice versa. In exploring these texts and images I also treat the hurricane itself as an ecological subject, though the framing of Katrina as a “natural disaster” will become problematized through the course of this study. The cultural productions of New Orleans must also be contextualised within its unique racial and environmental history that largely differs from American history as a whole. Utilising theoretical elements from ecocriticism, sociology, media studies, postcolonial studies and New Orleans studies, this paper presents a vision of Katrina that encapsulates the magnitude of the cultural response it caused. This study concludes that Hurricane Katrina offers us a tragic example of a violent “natural” force that elucidates a crisis of the modern urban space. Furthermore, displaced elements of the natural world colliding with human creations often serve as a representation of the chaos and trauma of the city, as in the cases of houses in trees and the “bathtub ring” around the city due to flooding. Water is also a large motif in these works, I argue that Katrina is an example of a racialised, environmental violence in America through the comparisons of the African diaspora with Katrina diaspora, and the hurricane with the middle passage.Dr Justin SausmanLecturer in English Literature, School of Humanities, University of HertfordshireReservoir noir and drowned villages: Ladybower Reservoir and Berlie Doherty’s Deep SecretThis paper explores the representation of dam and reservoir construction in Britain during the early to mid-twentieth century. It focuses on rural valleys and isolated communities, often in the north of England and Wales, that were flooded to create water supply for distant cities. The story of these ‘drowned villages’ as they are frequently (and emotively) referred to have been traced in several local histories and are often commemorated through information boards at the sites themselves. It is however only relatively recently that a number of novels have appeared focusing on this topic such as Sarah Hall’s Haweswater (2002) and Peter Robinson’s In A Dry Season (1999) among others. A number of common threads unite these novels, leading Peter Robinson to name them ‘reservoir noir’. They often blend sensational plots with an elegiac or nostalgic return to the past, while also focusing on the struggles of small communities, the impact of industrialisation on the rural landscape, and the revelation of past secrets hidden beneath the waters of the flooded valleys, frequently expressed through metaphors of haunting. This paper, reflecting the location of the conference, focuses on Berlie Doherty’s historical novel Deep Secret (2010) based on flooding of the villages of Ashopton and Derwent during the construction of Ladybower Reservoir in the Peak District National Park between 1935 and 1943. The paper asks why the novel should focus on this topic in the context of the present moment focusing on a) the symbolic weight attributed to the relatively insignificant (in terms of size) villages as emblems of environmental exploitation and the clash between industrial modernity and rural communities; b) the novel as a response to contemporary discussions of wildness and ‘re-wilding’ in nature writers such as Robert MacFarlane, George Monbiot and William Atkins; c) the novel as a counter narrative to nostalgic constructions of rural life and a reminder that apparently ‘natural’ landscapes have a human history. Drawing on work by cultural geographer John Wylie, the paper adopts a theoretical framework in which the act of walking around the reservoir constructs a narrative of the past. By focusing on architectural remains in the landscape and the story presented to visitors to through interpretive boards, the paper moves beyond more traditional textual sources to situate the novel in the context of the landscape today as well as the past that is the focus of its plot. To explore these questions the paper reflects the conference themes by crossing boundaries: between the temporal, situating the novel’s imagined history in the context of campaigns against the dam during the 1930s; between national boundaries, reflecting on the novel in the context of ongoing protests against reservoir construction worldwide today; and between the textual and geographical, drawing on cultural geography and tourism studies to read the way in which the cultural construction of the landscape today is haunted by its sunken past in the novel. Astrid BrackeAstrid Bracke's monograph, Climate Crisis and the Twenty-First-Century British Novel, will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2017. She writes on twenty-first-century British fiction and nonfiction, ecocriticism and narratology and has published on polar and climate crisis narratives, econarratological approaches to climate fiction, contemporary flood narratives, and science and ecology in Ian McEwan's novels. Her work has appeared in English Studies, ISLE and The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism. She is currently working on chapters for the Palgrave Handbook in Literature and Philosophy, Jim Crace: Into the Wilderness (Palgrave) and The Cambridge Companion to Ian McEwan. The ethics of the Anthropocene: Characterisation and narrative perspective in postmillennial British flood novelThe proposed paper focuses on the ethical dimensions of climate crisis and explores the questions four postmillennial British flood novels pose about who gets to survive, who is to blame and who the innocent bystanders are when the effects of climate crisis materialize. Anthropocene flood novels, I'll show, are shaped by the consequences of ethical dilemmas, and provide a space in which to think through the ethics of climate crisis.The paper moves towards the intersections of literary ecocriticism and philosophy by foregrounding characterization and narrative perspective as two lenses through which the ethics of climate crisis are explored in Antonia Honeywell's The Ship (2016), Megan Hunter's The End We Start From (2017), Clare Morrall's When the Floods Came (2016) and Ali Shaw's The Trees (2016), in which a waterless flood is described. Characterization is a key means of presenting moral issues in these works, particularly once familiar societal structures disappear. Narrative perspective, especially the first person, enforces the sense of exceptionalism inherent to flood stories, in which typically only the happy few survive. Similarly, contemporary climate crisis affects different peoples and regions disproportionally, often favouring those who are well off in the first place.Postmillennial flood novels, then, are productive sites in which to think through the ethical and moral as well as the narrative possibilities and limitations of imagining the Anthropocene. In turn, the paper provides a reflection on the novel in the Anthropocene that extends and challenges existing scholarship on the role of narratives in a time of climate crisis. Panel 3: Eco-mystic poeticsRichard KerridgeRichard Kerridge is a nature writer, ecocritic and writer on critical animal studies. Cold Blood: Adventures with Reptiles and Amphibians, (Chatto & Windus, 2014) his nature writing memoir, was adapted for BBC national radio and broadcast as a Radio 4 Book of the Week in July 2014. It was described by James McConnachie in The Sunday Times as “a minor classic.. exquisite” and by Helen Macdonald in The Financial Times as “moving, careful, humane and beautifully written”. Other nature writing by Richard has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in BBC Wildlife, Poetry Review and Granta. He was awarded the 2012 Roger Deakin Prize by the Society of Authors, and has twice received the BBC Wildlife Award for Nature Writing. J.H. Prynne: dialectical poetryChad Weidner Chad Weidner is Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at University College Roosevelt, an undergraduate faculty of Utrecht University, in the Netherlands. He has recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Environmental Humanities under the guidance of Rosi Braidotti, and has published on ecocriticism, the Beat Generation, and Dadaist film. He is the author of The Green Ghost: William Burroughs and the Ecological Mind (Southern Illinois University Press, 2016).Magnifying the Mystery: Denise Levertov and the Mystical Ecopoetics of NatureThis 20-minute paper presentation addresses one of the core themes of the conference call in studying the transnational and transcultural aspects of the Beat Generation. While Denise Levertov was a British poet that has received some recognition from scholars, the contributions of transnational women of the Beat Generation still require much more attention. Moreover, with few exceptions, the environmental humanities has neglected the work of Beat writers completely. Recent developments make clear that ecocriticism has opened itself up to a more comparative and transcultural orientation that "recognizes ethnic and national particularities and yet transcends ethnic and national boundaries" (Adamson and Slovic 6). The field of Beat studies has undergone a similar transnational shift (Grace and Skerl 2012, Fazzino 2016). Thus more transnational work is crucial to the continued development of both ecocriticism and Beat studies. Furthermore, ecocritical studies seem to privilege certain kinds of texts with obvious environmental potential, and largely avoid the many challenges posed in handling avant garde texts. And when we think of the Beat Generation, we tend to think of certain texts by specific authors. However, important questions remain. Can ecocriticism be deepened by engaging experimental transnational texts? Can scholarly activities help reconcile the many aesthetic questions the avant-garde demands? It is against this background that this paper will examine the ways in which the work of Denise Levertov connects to environmental discourse. Through application of contemporary ecocritical concepts, this paper will challenge both the typical subjects of ecocritical research and common assumptions about the apparent hegemonic composition of the Beat Generation. Although Denise Levertov is largely overlooked by Beat scholars and by environmental critics, examination of representative examples of her work highlights mystical connections to nature. This paper will therefore examine representative excerpts from Levertov's works to divulge some of the ways her writing engages in environmental discourse.Mary ModeenMary Modeen is an art-scholar, Chair of Interdisciplinary Art Practice,Associate Dean (International), Co-ordinator of PhD Studies, and founder and Course Director for the MFA in Art & Humanities at the University of Dundee,Scotland. She has many years of PhD supervision experience in interdisciplinary research, conducting an international practicein place-based research through creative art and writing. She co-convenes three place-based research networks: PLaCE International, Land2, and Mapping Spectral Traces, and is dedicated to a reflective practice of situated being, examined as a response to one’s environment.Seeing, Seeing In and Seeing Through: Visions and Imagings of Eco-Mystical PoetsThe evocations of eco-mystic poets are rich in their appeal to the visual imagination. From Rilke to the ‘deep-image’ poets James Wright and Robert Bly…from the gentle beckonings of William Stafford to Naomi Shahib Nye and–closer to home--in family resemblances between the finely crafted images of Elizabeth Bishop and Kathleen Jamie, the unseen appeal to the visual mode is explored in images, text and the spoken word.Panel 4: Eco-fictionPete SandsPete Sands has just completedan MA in English Literature athe University of Sheffield, and is about to start a PhD in the School of English on a critique of the concept of the Anthropocene. Weird Life After the Anthropocene in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach TrilogyAs a prominent discourse of environmental decline in recent years, both in ecological thought and popular culture, the Anthropocene has come to embody a narrative of catastrophe and collapse that upholds the homogenised figure of the Anthropos as the primary ecological agent on Earth. In doing so, this narrative reproduces some of the most fundamental laws of human identity that require, as Jacques Derrida has argued, the maintenance of a violent boundary between human and nonhuman. Donna Haraway’s recent work Staying With the Trouble provides a necessary intervention into the conceptual framework of the Anthropocene; the ‘Chthulucene’, for Haraway, decentres the human of the Anthropocene in favour of ‘ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with in times that remain at stake, in precarious times’. In this paper I want to locate the ‘precarious times’ that Haraway describes, through analysis of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy (2014), as times governed first and foremost by the logics of biopower. VanderMeer’s trilogy, on the one hand, aligns well with Haraway’s vision of the Chthulucene; Area X, the zone of ecological disaster the trilogy centres around, exemplifies the overwhelming complexity of interspecies relations that defines Haraway’s critique of the Anthropocene. On the other hand, the Southern Reach brings into focus some of the primary limitations of Haraway’s conception; far from emphasising the human’s stake in the ongoingness of a multispecies world, VanderMeer questions the very possibility of thought itself when faced with manifestations of life that resist assimilation into human structures of understanding. The impossibility of thinking life after the Anthropocene in Area X creates the conditions necessary for the kind of biopolitical critique which, according to Cary Wolfe, should remain attuned to the ‘uneven quality of our political moment’, along with all of its internal tensions and ambivalences. Such a critique rejects the sovereign conception of life as undifferentiated and singular, and locates its ethics, as with VanderMeer’s fiction, in a robust and continuing skepticism towards humanist imperatives to document, categorise and make known the nonhuman and ‘nature’. Dr Jenny BavidgeJenny Bavidge is Senior Lecturer and Academic Director for English Literature at the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education and a Fellow of Murray Edwards College, Cambridge. David Almond’s WildernessesThis paper continues a conversation which David Almond has opened up in ecocritical contexts about his own work and its representation and creation of ‘necessary wildernesses’. I wish to explore the ecophilosophies at work in David Almond’s children’s and YA fiction which melds gothic and realist writing with politics, myth and spiritual exploration. Almond’s books for children are notable for their explorations of empathy and love and their own ethics of care for their readers. His ‘bibliotherapy’ keeps faith with some aspects of some types of pastoral as a place of healing and recuperation of childhood wonder or teenage spirit. However, his writing also consistently recasts the models of encounter and testing found in the traditional narrative structures and poetics of young people’s literature which work to place them and judge them, or their proxies, against the natural world. Almond’s work, with its strong sense of place and affinity with the north-east of England, stretches from a mythically-inflected Northumberland coast to the ex-mining towns around Newcastle, and tracks his characters’ journeys towards self-knowledge through edgelands and liminal places (back gardens, beaches, abandoned industrial sites). Within these settings, Almond’s stories are full of transformations, becomings and hybrid forms (paper to animal, man to angel) and breaks in the surface of the everyday opened by grief, desire or growing up. Almond’s work builds on a distinctive tradition of dark pastoral in children’s/YA fiction (Swindells, Garner, Cooper) and I will track these affiliations, but also argue that Almond’s work is currently creating a distinct ecocritical poetics suited to the complex situation of children’s encounters with the Anthropocene. I will discuss Almond’s fictions (Skellig, Kit’s Wilderness, Song for Ella Grey) and his graphic novel collaborations with Dave McKean (Bird Mouse Snake Wolf, The Savage). The paper will focus on close-readings of sections of the novels in order to examine how these thematics make themselves felt in the details of the prose, and how an ethics of noticing or witnessing the emotional lives of children is matched to a concentrated ecological attentiveness.Koichiro ItoI have been a member of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (UK and Ireland) since 2015, when I was thrilled and delighted to meet some of you and give a presentation at the conference. I have been educated at the University of Victoria, Canada as well as Chiba University, Japan. I received my master's degree in English at the University of Victoria in 2011. I have read Modernist novels, Canadian literature, and ecological drama. Previously, I gave a presentation at the international conference of the Joseph Conrad Society in England in 2009 as well as at the ASLE biennial conference in the United States in 2011 and 2013. I plan to pursue a doctoral degree in English with a focus on modern and contemporary drama, ecology, and animal studies. Currently, I am teaching English in the Faculty of Global Studies at Musashino University in Tokyo, Japan.The Posthumanist Vision of the City in Jose Rivera’s MarisolRecently, some scholars in animal studies and posthumanism have revitalized the theme of zoopolis. Drawing upon urban theorist Jennifer Wolch’s idea of zoopolis, Stacy Alaimo argues that “[i]n one sense zoopolis demands an entirely differently outlook from citizens, city planners, park administrators, architects, and landscape architects, and landscape architects. In another sense, however, the concept may incite a recognition of the creatures that are always already in our midst” (2016). Alaimo highlights the necessity for urban environments to be reimagined as multi-species habitats. In the field of dramatic literature, Una Chaudhuri challenges this project that “seeks to imagine the city as a space of shared animality, an eco-system capable of supporting the lives, pleasures, and freedoms not only of its human citizens but also an expanded population of members of other species” (2017). Their scholarly works remind me that the representation of nonhuman animals in relation to human life and urban areas is still intriguing and deserves more critical attention. In this vein, Jose Rivera’s drama Marisol (1992) offers an opportunity to reconsider the precarious relationship between human and nonhuman characters in the context of the postmodern city. Through interactions between several human characters and the nonhuman character of the Angel in Marisol, Rivera describes the sensational and chaotic world of metropolitan New York just before the new millennium, creating a unique portrayal of urban life.Building on Cary Wolfe’s and Rosi Braidotti’s significant works, the paper will focus on the posthumanist perspective on the city in Marisol. I will explore how and why the nonhuman character of the Angel actively supports the sustainability of the planet in the face of environmental issues and species extinction. An interesting example can be found in Act 1 Scene 4 in which the Angel slips into the protagonist Marisol’s dream world to inform her that the universe is contaminated and angels are struggling to revitalize the universe: “The universal body is sick, Marisol. . . . Angels are going to kill the King of Heaven and restore the vitality of the universe with His blood.” The angels are more conscious of possible perils on a universal scale. The foundation of their actions and thoughts lies in the spirit of self-sacrifice. The angels stay true to their convictions and continually work to further their cause. Their strong and enduring focus on the reconstruction of the universe clearly contrasts with the fragile and distracted minds of humans, especially those in urban areas who are unfamiliar with their own neighborhoods. Taking into account the posthumanist vision, I will argue how Rivera’s dramatic world is interesting and imaginative in portraying the insensitivity and chaos of metropolitan cities everywhere by presenting a joining of the heavenly world and urban life.Panel 5: UnboundedDr Lucy CollinsLucy Collins is a lecturer in English Literature at University College Dublin, Ireland. Educated at Trinity College Dublin and at Harvard University, where she spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar, she teaches and researches in the area of modern poetry and poetics. She has published widely on modern Irish and British poetry – recent publications include Contemporary Irish Women Poets: Memory and Estrangement (Liverpool, 2015) and The Irish Poet and the Natural World: An Anthology of Verse in English from the Tudors to the Romantics, edited with Andrew Carpenter (Cork, 2014).Moving Landscapes: Nature unbound in the work of Willie Doherty and Seamus HeaneyThe border as both a political and aesthetic construct plays an important role in literature and visual art from Northern Ireland. An expression of contested identities, and of the long reach of political division in Ireland, the border between north and south has environmental implications too, altering the relationship between land and human community in fundamental ways. The militarised landscapes of the province are slow to change, and reflect the asynchronous relationship between natural and political worlds. By exploring work by two of Northern Ireland’s most significant creative artists, I will consider the ways in which poetry and photography engage with the concepts of border landscape through contingent and temporally challenging representations. Seamus Heaney’s treatment of landscape is often concerned with the role of language in shaping perception, as well as with the relationship between place and states of recognition and belonging. Willie Doherty also examines the ways in which the representation of landscape confronts the overlapping yet contested narratives of human and more-than-human worlds – the act of ‘unreliable witness’ that implicates the process of making in the realised image. In this paper I will explore how both these artists deepen our understanding of the temporality of landscapes and examine the relationship of the human subject to physical and imaginative boundaries. Ann CarragherAnn Carragher is a practicing artist and lecturer of Fine Art.Her visual art practice is relative to numerous ‘typologies’- recent work addresses states of 'in-betweenness' and 'liminality', relative to the natural & built environment.She presents works that weave together notions of loss and lament, by exploring the ambiguous and allusive qualities that manifest (physically and psychologically) in the intersection between space, place, mobility and memory.Border’s, hinterlands and thresholds are a recurring theme, where the past, present and future are conflated, mediating on paradoxes between materiality and the evanescence. Landscape, Liminality and LamentMy current visual research explores the overlapping and interwoven histories of the landscape in and around the ‘South Armagh/ Louth Border’ (the territory between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, also known as the ‘Gap of the North’) close to the town of Newry, Northern Ireland, where I grew up. It is an inquiry into the cultural, social and political resonances of border experience –– through a practice-based investigation of identity, memory and place. My practice-based research engages with and attempts to deconstruct the historical, social and cultural elements that have shaped ‘The Gap of the North’. This project will also become increasingly relevant as the area will be significantly affected by ‘Brexit’, and the possibility and return of a hard border could have serious political and economic consequences; presenting the return to an atmosphere of oppression and mistrust, surveillance and control. Steeped in history and trauma, the political, physical landscape of the area, active, bloody and turbulent, is well documented and memorialized.Strangeness and fear exudes from the political human horror and mythological endeavours that are entwined in the fabric of the area; in the layers of colonial history and in the evidence of a once highly militarised panoptical zone by a dominant discourse of occupation, control and surveillance. However, the area is also synonymous with pilgrimage and ritual, religion is interwoven into the topography of the landscape and women’s position is mythical and apocryphal, fixed yet fluid, wavering somewhere between absence and presence. The concept of liminality is firmly rooted in anthropological and religious discourse, with recent emergence (The Spectral Turn) and application in socio-political and cultural studies. The pursuit of a female subjective voice informed by cultural modes of agency, power structures and fragmentation of identity is central to the study. The term “liminal” is applicable temporally as well as spatially, psychologically as well as physically - it is often discussed in terms of space, place, memory and identity, regarding transitional spaces, frontiers, border zones and contested territories. The site and place of ‘The Gap’ is central in unearthing and revealing forgotten subjectivities, whilst simultaneously providing fertile ground for the development of new visual strategies. The notion of liminality is a pervasive aspect of modernity in an increasingly globalised world, where boundaries are dissolved and identity is lost (Bhabha 2007), however liminality is also a pervasive aspect of Irish cultural identity as a legacy of colonialism and post colonial discourse (Holmsten, Nordin 2013) - where identity is complicated and ‘haunted’ by spectres of past trauma, displacement and diasporic experience, understood as a ‘case of strange dualism’ (O’Byrne 2015) and/ or ‘schizophrenic experience’, unable to reconcile the past with the present (O’Sullivan 2009).Daniela KatoDaniela Kato is an associate professor of English at the Kyoto Institute of Technology, Japan. Portuguese-born, over the past ten years she has taught at several universities in Japan and China, as well as participated in various projects of ecological restoration and community development. Her current research interests are intermedial in approach and revolve around landscape and environmental aesthetics. She is particularly interested in exploring the interface between contemporary literature, the visual arts and anthropology concerning landscape perception, transculturation, and women’s creativity and subjectivity, through the analysis of a variety of material practices such as writing, drawing, painting, sculpture and photography.Contemporary Japanese Women Visual Artists Living in ‘The West’: Boundaries, landscapes, transculturationsThis paper will discuss work by contemporary Japanese-born women visual artists whose distinct experiences of living in Europe and North America have crucially shaped the innovative ways in which they engage with landscape and thereby negotiate multiple cultural and gender boundaries: Leiko Ikemura (Japan/Germany), Mimi Kato (Japan/US) and Junko Mori (Japan/UK), among others. My key concern is to demonstrate how the fluid “in-between” landscapes variously imagined by these artists are sites of negotiation and contestation with the potential to defy not only the orientalist discourses that have exoticised/infantilised Japan and its cultural products, but also the masculinist traditions of landscape representation – in the East and in the West – that have marginalised women artists (Adams and Robins 2001).To achieve this, I will bring together a number of strands of contemporary thinking around the traveling concepts of boundaries and borders (Boer 2006; Holm 2012), migratory culture (Bal and Hernández-Navarro 2011), as well as transculturation and its creative processes of cultural translation, which have been diversely probed by postcolonial critics (Bhabha 1993) and multispecies ethnographers (Tsing 1997, 2015; Satsuka 2015).Energising my discussion will be an intermedial approach (Ellestr?m 2010) that seeks to do justice to these visual artists’ shared commitment to blurring aesthetic boundaries between different media – namely painting, calligraphy, sculpture, photography and performance. Such intermedial crossings are, I shall argue, an integral part of their crossing of other cultural and gender boundaries. C-M-I-T Abstracts Thursday 7 SeptemberParallel Panels Session DPanel 1: Water?gnes Lehóczky?gnes Lehóczky is a poet, scholar and translator originally from Budapest. Her poetry collections published in the UK are Budapest to Babel (Egg Box Publishing, 2008), Rememberer (Egg Box Publishing, 2012) and Carillonneur (Shearsman Books, 2014). She also has three poetry collections in Hungarian: ikszedik stáció (Universitas, 2000), Medalion (Universitas, Budapest, 2002) and Palimpszeszt (Magyar Napló, Budapest, 2015). She was the winner of the Arthur Welton Poetry Award 2010 and the inaugural co-winner of the Jane Martin Prize for Poetry at Girton College, Cambridge, in 2011. She was also Hungary’s representative poet for Poetry Parnassus at Southbank Centre during London’s Cultural Olympiad in Summer 2012. She currently works as a lecturer and teaches creative writing at the University of Sheffield. Her recent pamphlet, Pool Epitaphs and Other Love Letters, was published by Boiler House Press in 2017.Place, Peril and Pool: to Undo the Uncanny?My proposal is offering a hybrid presentation on ‘Place and Peril: THE UN-UNCANNY’ including a short talk followed by a reading of pool poems. My presentation is posing a short introduction to artworks which, in various ways, explore the phenomenology of ‘pool’: The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1510) by Bosch, Helen Chadwick’s The Oval Court (1984-86) and Karine Laval’s Poolscapes and The Pool (2009-2010); also her State of Flux (2013-2014), a series of short films the artist filmed underwater as well as Judith Tucker’s art series Postmemorial Landscapes: Places in Play (2008); images partly reflecting on Friedrichroda pool, a pool where the artist’s mother learned to swim and, coincidentally, where the 1936 German Olympic Team practised in the late 1930s. The introduction will also include minor references to La Piscine, a 1969 Italian-French film directed by Jacques Deray, starring Alain Delon, Romy Schneider, Maurice Ronet and Jane Birkin. The introduction of these artworks will be followed by a simple reading of two prose poems from my new collection Swimming Pool (Shearsman Books, 2017). Each art work in a sense portrays ‘pool’ as a place of inevitable binary or polarity paralleling the nature of the phenomenological place of the poem always inseparably fused into erasure, axioms or premises /promises inseparable from doubt and negation, both poem and pool as pars pro toto, literalness as palimpsestic, almost always layered into metaphor, memory, allegory: place, pool and poem as bricolage and storage of risk, danger and peril: place, pool and poem as multifunctional and as transformation trope always in motion and/or metamorphing, and/or dialectic of feeling, memory and hermeneutics; place, pool and poem as both Eros and Thanatos: ‘O that thin and invisible border between the beautiful and the / bizarre, the beatific and the brutal’ – an ‘absent pool present for now’; a ‘pond full of various magic and mirage’ … ‘long morphed into a landscape somewhere else.’ Here I suggest text or poem is swimming pool, a pool in which language or thought-as-body glide through cultural and or phenomenological spaces; fluid places for being, thinking or even swimming in the world. It is polyglottal within English, let alone in relation to all the other tongues almost audible and to the maps of Europe that move to and fro somewhere under the text.Rachel Nisbet Rachel Nisbet’s doctoral thesis investigates how ‘Earth ethics’ have evolved over the Anthropocene (1800-present) through a transhistorical study of four river narratives. She holds a BA (First-Class Hons.) in ‘Humanities with Literature’, and a Docteur-ès-sciences in Geology. Her most recent publication is “James Joyce’s Urban EcoAnarchism” (2016). She currently teaches at the University of Lausanne, where she has devised a creative writing workshop, and gives classes on ‘Dorothy and William Wordsworth’s Lake District’, and ‘Modern and Contemporary Eco-drama’. Alice Oswald’s Sleepwalk on the Severn: A cosmo-centric eco-drama?Responding to the conference theme, Inter Trans, and approaching ecopoetics as what Skinner calls “a form of site specificity”, I want to examine Alice Oswald’s poem Sleepwalk on the Severn through the lens of eco-drama. While “not a play”, but “a poem in several registers”, this dramatic poem nevertheless advances through focus on plot, in the Aristotelian sense of ‘the imitation of the action’ (Poetics 62). The action in question is the waxing and waning moon’s effect on the voices within the Severn River Estuary. Due to this focus on the moon’s aural effect, Oswald’s poem surprisingly eschews the spectacular. Instead it is predominantly immersive, its focus on aurality creating a sense of being within a strange crepuscular moonlight environment. References to ambient sounds - birdcalls, car noise, wind, and “a huge repeating mechanism/banging and banging the jetty” – place us near the Severn. Concomitantly, we experience this site through the embodied perspective of an Oswoldian ‘dream-secretary’ who takes notes in a form of ‘environmental live writing’. This record includes her free indirect discourse, and the amplification of her poetic style using the device of parabasis, a stepping forward in which the chorus addresses the audience often in the name of the poet. Parabasis underscores the lyric style of an Oswald poem, its epideictic discourse insistently persuading the reader to listen. Ironically, in the context of this dramatic poem, the lyric voice is interrupted by the direct discourse of, for instance, a bird watcher, fisherman, and articled clerk: All these voices are modulated by the moon’s waxing and waning. Consequently, Sleepwalk might be described as both anthropocentric and cosmo-centric. It is anthropocentric as the Severn’s preternatural night scenes are interpreted by a poet making sense of her environment through personification. It is cosmo-centric in its listening into an extraordinary tidal environment.Nick Triplow Nick Triplow is a writer and researcher. Originally from London, now living in Barton-upon-Humber, Nick studied English and Creative Writing at Middlesex University and holds an MA in Writing from Sheffield Hallam University. He is the author of the acclaimed novel Frank’s Wild Years and the non-fiction/social history books The Women They Left Behind, Distant Water, Pattie Slappers and Family Ties. Nick’s forthcoming biography of British noir fiction pioneer, Getting Carter: Ted Lewis and the Birth of Brit Noir will be published by No Exit in autumn, 2017.Dr Gillian HobsonGillian Hobson is a British artist whose work is concerned with subjectivity and place, and the ways in which this intimate relation may be communicated, constructed and indeed analysed through art-making. Her practice responds to the particularities of the person/place relation and its’ affective potentials. Projects include site specific/site responsive works and research led investigative projects. Her hybrid practice embraces three dimensional works, craft practices, installation, photography, moving image and sound.Memories of waterIn summer 2015, writer Nick Triplow and artist Gillian Hobson embarked on a series of walks along a remote stretch of the Lincolnshire coastline - Triplow in an attempt to trace the mental and physical dislocations which impacted on Ted Lewis’ final novel GBH: Hobson as a psychogeographical experiment arising from her doctoral research interests surrounding the dynamic relation of person and environment (after Debord & Coverley). This presentation discusses how fragments of photography, moving image, writing and conversation (recorded during these visits) prompted the making of their collaborative short film work Memory of Water, and the ways in which this reimagining exists as an expression of memory work, impacting on their own relation to place and its potentials. The Memory of Water project has operated around a very particular lens where considerations of the dislocations and relocations of person and place which occur throughout Lewis’ writings prompt conversations around ideas of non places (after Burgin) and the ways in which art-making and viewing disrupts the matrices of association bound up with person, sight and site. Film director Mike Hodges iconic 1971 film Get Carter was a reworking of Lewis’ first novel Jack’s Return Home, set in and around the small Lincolnshire village of Barton upon Humber. As Lewis’ biographer, Triplow’s fascination with the unconscious and unconscious resonances of place in Lewis’ writing finds coherence with Hobson’s explorations of affect (after Massumi and Brennan) in a consideration of the relation of affect to memory and imagination, and the durational aspects of image and sound as integral of ideas of extended looking. As an example of practice based activity the resulting film work, as both document and meditation, posits engagement with image making and landscape as a dynamic field of inter- and intra- subjective potential where the complexities of person/place may operate within and without formal language, and the ways in which this interplay, complete with its’ unstable materialities and dissolved resistances, manifests as artistic production. Panel 2: Other than humanElspeth TullochElspeth Tulloch is an Associate Professor of Canadian Literature in the Département de littérature, thé?tre et cinéma at Université Laval (Quebec City, Canada). Her current ecocritical interests focus on narratives of ecological disruption, biodiversity loss, or extinction, and memoirs bearing witness to these issues. Comeback Kit: Transatlantic return tales of the beaver on the brinkUrsula Heise has observed that many narratives about endangered or extinct species draw on elegiac or tragic modes, emphasizing end-points. By encouraging the reader to mourn the impending or actual passing of a once prevalent and remarkable species, such texts often seek to generate reader sympathy for the vanishing animal or nostalgia for a once more diverse biotic era. The past looms large. While exposing anthropogenic causes for local or species-wide extinctions, these narratives often either overtly or implicitly critique practices associated with modernity. Heise also identifies an alternative way of culturally conceptualizing the issue of species loss, one that she sees expressed through the comic mode. Allowing for uncertainty and improbable or unexpected modes of survival, it envisions an open-ended future, the imagining of new beginnings. Arguably various factors will contribute to shaping the generic mode of a text dealing with species decline. Forward-looking perceptions may well be possible even while accepting the tragedy of loss. Indeed, I would suggest that there is more variation and mixing in the tales of threatened species than the tragic vs. comic generic templates that Heise identifies. This paper will explore this claim through a comparative discussion of two prose narratives advocating the return of the beaver in Canada in the 1930s and in Britain some eighty-five years later. In particular key scenes will be examined in Grey Owl’s eco-memoir Pilgrims of the Wild (1934) in conjunction with Jim Crumley’s Nature's Architect: The Beaver's Return to Our Wild Landscapes (2015). Ultimately these texts take future-looking stances without effacing the darker clouds of former or possible extinction, as the case may be. Tactics for infusing a sense of human accommodation to the non-human differ in accordance with contemporaneous socio-historical and environmental circumstances. Grey Owl (an English immigrant to Canada who assumed an indigenous identity) draws on and adapts the pet culture of his period to have his conservation message appeal to his readers. He encourages them to embrace the wild by learning about his experiments of taming beaver kits with whom he intimately lives. In part, he seeks to bring the wild in. Crumley, on the other hand, advocates letting the wild out, arguing for allowing free-living wild beaver, which may have initially been enclosed, part of trials to reintroduce the beaver, to live freely. Taking different tacks, each writer outlines a situation in which the human must learn to negotiate with the unexpected arrival of the beaver—adapting to creatures, which in reshaping their environment, contribute to deeper renewal, both in the non-human and the human.Maria MossMaria Moss received her doctoral degree in one of her life-long passions--Native American Studies-–from the University of Hamburg in 1993 and her post-doctoral degree in neo-realist American literature from the Free University Berlin in 2006. She is director of the Center for Modern Languages at Leuphana University Lüneburg where she has been teaching North American Studies since 2007. In addition to numerous publications on Native issues, she has recently branched out into the fields of animal ethics and Critical Animal Studies. Her other fields of teaching and research include Canadian Studies, environmental literature, and creative writing. She is one of the editors of the American Studies Journal () and the American Studies Blog (blog.).Unlikely Friendships: Prey and predator reconsideredFor some time already, science has focused on unusual interactions between species. Yet until recently, any suggestion that interspecies relationships might be based on companionship would have probably met with derision and dismissed as anthropomorphic illusions. These attitudes, however, are bound to change as research is gradually beginning to erode some boundaries separating homo sapiens and other animals. Other species, it turns out, share abilities once considered exclusive to humans, including tool use, counting, certain aspects of language, emotions, and even a sense of morale. Given these findings, why would it be so outrageous to suggest that relationships between animals generally considered arch enemies (or at least incompatible) could not only exist, but indeed develop into long-lasting, trusting relationships?Barbara J. King, an anthropologist at the College of William and Mary, suggested some criteria for the term “relationship”: a relationship, she proposed, must be sustained for some period of time; there must be mutuality, with both of the animals engaged in the interaction; and some sort of accommodation must take place in the service of the relationship, whether a modification in behavior or in communication. On the Internet there is no shortage of stories about animals that have reached out across species barriers. However, in some of the more popular online videos and YouTube clips (e.g. of a snake frolicking with a hamster, its intended lunch) these criteria are clearly missing since it is unclear whether the two are best friends or whether the snake simply is not hungry.The beginning of my paper relies on the findings of Barbara Smuts––a professor of psychology and anthropology––who has lived among baboons in the wild and has shocked some of her colleagues by applying the word “friendship” to describe bonds between female baboons. Based on the story of her dog, Safi, an 80-pound German Shepherd mix, who forges a friendship with a donkey named Wister on a ranch in Wyoming in the 1990s, Smuts not only observed the gradual development of an unusual relationship, but also the development of a common language between the two animals.I my presentation I will look at various examples of cross-species interactions which––although occurring in an environment controlled by humans––could nevertheless add to our understanding of how species communicate, what constitutes a “friendship” between members of different species, what propels certain animals to connect across species lines, and the degree to which some animals can adopt the behaviors of other species.Beth SavageBeth Savage is an artist researcher based in York. Her work investigates human/nature relationships and social ecologies with a particular focus on human/animal interaction. She has undertaken major residencies at Camperdown Wildlife Centre in Dundee and with the Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust at Attenborough Nature Reserve and has exhibited widely across the UK and internationally. Beth’s practice spans performance, installation, sculpture and writing and she is currently a PhD candidate at Teesside University. Asymmetric Co-production: Strategies for collaborating with non-human entitiesIn his essay, Art in the Age of Asymmetry, Timothy Morton asserts that art is a collaboration between humans and non-humans, this is a seductive yet problematic idea and although many artists see their work as a “collaboration with nature” in practice meaningful collaborations are far more elusive than the vast array of nature themed art might have you believe. There are distinctions to be drawn between inspiration, medium and collaboration which can often be hard to determine, however, there is a lot to be gained by seeking to work collaboratively with non-human worlds.This paper will explore some of the ways in which I and other visual artists approach collaboration across species lines and subject/object boundaries, and will examine where these practices stand up and where they collapse. Focusing on a few key artworks, including my Masters project, Watermark, Hubert Duprat’s Caddis Fly Larvae with Cases, and Olly and Suzi’s Shark Bite, I will unpick the difficulties and peculiarities of collaborating with forces and beings that cannot communicate or do so in other-than-human ways and discuss issues such as authorship and consent that arise through these collaborative processes.This paper will question how human models of collaborative practice, such as Vera John-Steiner’s four ‘patterns’ of collaboration, as well as Morton’s notion of all art as collaboration, stand up in practice when working with non-human beings. It will also re-examine how we view notions of contribution whilst taking a critical view of works which claim to be collaborative in order to move towards a set of strategies for collaborating with nature. I argue that these strategies for the making of artwork with non-human beings describe a process of asymmetric co-production that might also prove useful for other areas such as conservation, zoology and geography and so also contribute to an interdisciplinary understanding of non-human worlds. Anastacia CardoneI am a young MA graduate from the Università degli Studi di Milano (Milan), Italy. After obtaining the Bachelor of Arts in 2012 with a thesis on Henry David Thoreau’s concepts of wilderness and middle landscape in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, I carried out research in American nature writing and ecocriticism. In 2015 I obtained the Master of Arts (with honors) with the dissertation “From Aesthetics to Biosemiotics: Annie Dillard, Mary Oliver, and Nature as a Wholeness”. I published the article “Where the Twin Oceans of Beauty and Horror Meet: An Aesthetic Analysis of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”, in the European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment (Vol. 7, No. 2, 2016). I have recently applied for PhD programs and I am waiting for the outcomes. I hope to start my PhD in October 2017.‘Though not by words, it was a more than satisfactory way to the bridge of understanding.’ Communication with the Environment in Mary Oliver’s EcopoetryAt the core of ecocritical studies there is an interdisciplinary approach to literary texts that may highlight the conversations between literature and the world beyond the written page, as well as between humanities and sciences. These cross-disciplinary approaches have also enabled scholars to tackle the challenges presented by the contemporary environmental crises by employing humanistic knowledge both to raise awareness and provide possible solutions to the increasing human estrangement from the living world. Furthermore, environmental humanities have been widenedthanks to the contribution of many other disciplines, such as natural sciences, animal studies, ecophilosophy, anthropology, and environmental ethics. While the boundaries between humanities and sciences are still hard to cross, the limits between human and other-than human life are more ephemeral than we usually think. An innovative approach that can further break down these barriers and cast new light on literary texts and on the importance of a fecund dialogue between humanities and sciences is biosemiotics, the science that studies the semiosis of life and communication between individuals and their environment. As Haraway underlines, the encounter between humans and animals have biosemiotic importance: “species of all kinds, living and not, are consequent on asubject- and object-shaping dance of encounters” in the practice of what she calls “becoming with”. Thus, this presentation aims at disclosing the biosemiotic suggestions in the ecopoetry by the American writer Mary Oliver (1935). Ecopoetry itself as a genre recognizes the intrinsicinterdependency of every natural facts, human life included. First, by employing some of the core concepts of biosemiotics, such as Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt and Seifenblase, and Jesper Hoffmeyer’s semiosphere and semiotic freedom, I will show how Oliver’s ecopoems express aconception of the environment and of human beings’ place in it as extremely different from Western anthropocentrism. In addition, a biosemiotic analysis of Oliver’s poetry will demonstrate that thepoet manages to shape groundbreaking and inclusive relationships between humans and other-than human beings through her poetic texts. These relationships, based on empathy, clearly outline thefundamental difference between perception of the outer world and participation in the life of others, a difference that is also illustrated by the German philosopher Martin Buber through the concepts of I-It and I-You relations. Last but not least, thanks to these renewed connections with other lives, Oliver is able to communicate with the surrounding environment and other living creatures, coming to a crossing of the boundaries between humans and animals, and between the lyrical voice and the surrounding environment. Not only do the rational and communicative barriers fall down, but Oliver’s poems also express the complete flowing of her life “into the body of another”, as she states in the poem “Blossom”. Therefore, by analyzing her writing in the light of biosemiotics, it will be possible to show one of the ways in which we can overcome those never-ending boundaries that have been separating and alienating human beings from the rest of the living world.Panel 3: BirdsBrycchan Carey Brycchan Carey is Professor of English at Northumbria University and Chair of ASLE-UKI.The Surprising Poeticism of Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne (1789)Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne (1789), in the view of David Elliston Allen, is ‘the one literary classic, universally acknowledged, that the subject [of natural history] in all its years of existence has so far managed to produce’. Made up of letters from the clergyman and amateur naturalist Gilbert White (1720–93) to the natural historian Thomas Pennant (1726–98) and the naturalist and antiquarian Daines Barrington (c. 1728–1800), Selborne has inspired botanists and birdwatchers for more than two centuries as well as readers more attuned to its vivid descriptive language and ability to intensely evoke its location. Frequently quoted and alluded to by naturalists, nature writers, and local historians, its language and form have, however, rarely been examined in depth. This paper accordingly closely reads both White’s prose and verse to show that he was a practiced and enthusiastic literary author as well as an innovative natural historian, who made use of poetic language and mythic narratives to produce a work that is often surprisingly poetic.David BorthwickDr David Borthwick teaches at the University of Glasgow’s School of Interdisciplinary Studies, where he convenes the Masters programme Environment, Culture and Communication, and contributes, and contributes to the BSc Environmental Science and Sustainability.Flight Ways, Goose Music and Metamorphosis: Migratory Birds and the Transnational TiltTed Hughes’ poem ‘Swifts’ records the poet’s delight at the return of Apus apus: ‘they’ve made it again / Which means the globe’s still working.’[1] The word ‘migrate’, as Ruth Padel notes, ‘comes from the Latin migrare, “to move from one place to another”, and is related to “mutable” and the Greek ameibein, “to change”.’[2] Seasonal transnational and transcontinental migration occurs across the world for, as William Fiennes notes, ‘We are tilted’:The axis of the Earth’s rotation is not perpendicular to the plane of the Earth’s orbit round the sun. It is tilted at about 23.5 degrees. The tilt means that the northern and southern hemispheres are angled towards the sun for part of the year… We have seasons… All creatures must adapt to these cycles if they are to survive. Migration is a way of coping with the tilt.’[3]Avian migrants—such as Swallows and Swifts—have a rich history of being welcomed as harbingers of Summer, yet at the other end of the year the arrival of winter migrants, from Redwing and Waxwing to Whooper Swan and Fieldfare—is also to be celebrated as evidence that systems of global exchange and biosemiotic signatures are still effective in ‘coping with the tilt’. More than this, as the work of Thom van Dooren has shown, interactions with avians reveals ‘multispecies entanglements’ in which animals and birds inform and become a part of the way in which ‘social practices and cultures are formed’—intergenerational ‘flight ways’ of interspecies practice, and co-habitation of spaces which denies the dualistic thinking that insists on human exceptionalism. In preference, van Dooren advocates ethical investment in the transnational stories of our nonhuman neighbours.[4] This paper will focus on winter avian migrants to Scotland, in particular geese, and with special attention to the Barnacle Goose (Branta leucopsis), one of whose populations exchanges Svalbard for the Solway Firth annually to overwinter, displaying exceptional philopatric tendencies to return to saltmarsh and particular short sward fields each winter. In the littoral zone beyond human dwellings, this traveller of 2000 miles roosts in a transit zone for thousands of other winter migrants. The Barnacle Goose has a remarkably long entanglement with human narrative, which lends it its name:No one on these shores could ever find their nests,so in early times it was concludedthat they hatched from the pupa-shaped goose barnacle—as fish, they were eaten on Fridays[5]Despite the myth—documented in the C11—there were fewer than 400 individual birds on the Solway in the winter of 1946, and a remarkable conservation effort has increased numbers until they peaked at 42, 000 in the Winter of 2016. Using poems by Moya Cannon, Dermot Healey and Tom Pickard,[6] the paper will investigate the metamorphic and mutable Barnacle Goose, transnational and storied trans-species, its homeplaces littoral and esturine, its neighbours fox, otter, and polar bear, and fix upon its shared ‘flight-ways’ with humans: from near extinction and into the age of the sixth mass extinction.[1] Ted Huges, ‘Swifts’, Collected Poems, ed Paul Keegan (London: Faber, 2003), p. 315.[2] Ruth Padel, The Mara Crossing (London: Chatto & Windus, 2012), p. 2.[3] William Fiennes, The Snow Geese (London: Picador, 2002), p. 12[4] Thom van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (New York: Columbia U.P., 2014), p. 4[5] Moya Cannon, ‘Winter Birds’, Carrying the Songs (Manchester: Carcanet, 2007), p. 13[6] Moya Cannon, Carrying the Songs (Manchester: Carcanet, 2007), Dermot Healey, A Fool’s Errand (Loughcrew: Gallery Press, 2010), Tom Pickard, Winter Migrants (Manchester: Carcanet, 2016).Erin Kavanagh Erin Kavanagh is a poet and photographer, artist, archaeologist and academic based in West Wales. Her research concentrates upon the space between disciplines, encompassing narrative and site specific knowledge representation. She is currently extending work begun under two grants, one directing a deep map of Cardigan Bay under the ISRF (htttp://) and the other a collaboration under Cymerau () in which she employed poetry as archaeological method for public engagement. Iain BiggsIain Biggs works as a doctoral supervisor, artist, researcher, and writer based in Bristol who regularly visits the north of England, Scotland and the Irish republic. He has a long-term interest in deep mapping and is currently contributing to an AHRC-funded project on hydro-citizenship. He has been exploring ‘lost’ vernacular quasi-animist traditions through site-specific work on the English/Scottish Borders for many years and has a related interest in convergences between ‘subjugated’ traditional ontologies and contemporary theory. The Crow RoadThis performative presentation has at its core a new poem by Erin Kavanagh entitled The Crow Road, taken as a basis for reflecting both on aspects of the relationships between non-human and human beings and on related issues of place, presence and absence. We take as our academic starting-point two observations: Firstly, Barbara Bender’s view (broadly interpreted) that: “Landscapes refuse to be disciplined. They make a mockery of the oppositions that we create between time [History] and space [Geography], or between nature[Science] and culture [Social Anthropology]” (Bender quoted Massey 2006: 34) and secondly, Gaston Bachelard’s provocative suggestion that: “It might even be a good idea to stir up competition between conceptual and imaginative activity. In any case, all efforts to make them cooperate are doomed to disappointment. The image cannot give matter to the concept; the concept, by giving stability to the image, would stifle its existence.” (Bachelard in Guadin 1994: 6).Erin Kavanagh’s poem evokes imaginal reflections that both converge with and counterpoint Iain Biggs’ long-term research concerns with an animism ‘hidden in plain sight’ in traditions of Scottish vernacular culture. This provides the productive tension that animates their collaboration. The performance itself will consist of a resonant constellating of interrelated images through the process of both convergence and counterpoint. Included in the process is an intention to indicate why limitations inherent in current notions of cross-, multi-, inter-, and trans-disciplinarity are inadequate to our current psychosocial and environmental situations. In foregrounding the polyvalence of the poetic and visual image and in the spirit of offering an amplification of Donna J. Haraway’s use of the term kin in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), the presentation will take the central image of the crow as the focus. This will reflect a renewed relevance in the now largely archaic term kith (Middle English kitthe - kinsmen, but also homeland, native region; relationship and knowledge). In the process, it will touch on such issues as the ecological importance of revisiting the tripartite nature of the soul - for example as the fylgja, hamr, and hugr, as the soul not necessarily being tied to human form - as suggestive of ways of reimagining our relationship to the world of being. Panel 4: Landscape and cultural imaginationMajella ClancyMajella Clancy is a lecturer in Painting, Drawing & Printmaking at PlymouthCollege of Art. She is also avisual artist whose researchexplores painting andprintmaking in expanded ways. In 2013 she completed a practice-?‐led PhD at UlsterUniversity, Belfast where herresearch examined Contemporary Women’sPainting Practices. She haspresented her researchnationally and internationally,including: Land2 / Landand Water Conference, Plymouth College of Art and Plymouth University (2016). The Art Association of Australia and New Zealand, annual conference, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, (2011). Her research is published in Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Routledge, USA, (2012). She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally. Her work isheld in public and privatecollections including QueensUniversity Belfast, Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Ulster University, Belfast.Irregular activity: space, place and the Irish cultural imaginationThis paper examines ideas of space and place making within contemporary Irish art practices. I address my own hybrid painting practice that investigates an Irish rural history through ideas of geographical and cultural space. I examine the historical conflation of Irish woman and Irish land and the various ways in which that constructed position can be re-examined through ideas of ‘indeterminacy’ and ‘non-determined possibility’ that enables a circumvention of restrictions (Bracken, p. 3). I use my painting practice as a critical tool that can speak to and from that particular history where ideas of transformation and re-imagining in relation to the Irish landscape and Irish cultural experience is still necessary.I address the practice of the Irish American artist Helen O’ Leary who takes on her Irish rural history as a visual language in the studio. Here the vernacular and the rural is folded into a language for painting. Through an expanded painting practice O’Leary articulates ideas of place and space making that unravels and rebuilds in ways that speaks to historical and contemporary (Irish) conditions. I look to the work of Irish Poet Seamus Heaney who through his writing allows a space for language to unfold in relation to the Irish landscape and the Irish consciousness. Rooted in the parochial, the everyday, and the colloquial, a language emerges here that is universal where ideas of translation and the visualisation of a word becomes important. I examine the various ways in which the Irish landscape can act as a critical, transformative space that can address social and political concerns, both past and present; it becomes a space for re-examination, re-imagining and re-making.Anne ElveyAnne Elvey holds honorary appointments at Monash University and University of Divinity, Australia. She is author of The Matter of the Text: Material Engagements between Luke and the Five Senses, and Kin (poetry), and co-editor of several essay collections on the interface between ecological ethics and religion. Anne is managing editor of Plumwood Mountain: An Australian Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics. Her poetry collection White on White is due out in early 2018. Anne is a member of ASLEC-ANZ.Unsettling the ‘White Possessive’ – decolonisation and ecopoetics: a performative oral collageThis presentation performs a conversational inquiry into the possibility and necessity of unsettling whiteness, and what Aileen Moreton-Robinson calls ‘The White Possessive’, in Australian ecological poetry and poetics. In conversation with Moreton-Robinson (The White Possessive), Peter Minter (Plumwood Mountain 2.2), Bruce Pascoe (Dark Emu), Katrina Schlunke (Bluff Rock) and Bonny Cassidy (in Cordite 55 and Plumwood Mountain 3.1), I present an oral collage of narrative, theory and poetry to examine the ‘poethic’ processes at work in my forthcoming collection White on White (Cordite Books, 2018). Peter Minter writes of a ‘vision of a decolonised Australia, a place where settler and Indigenous cultures have begun to find an existential common ground that is beyond postcolonial’ (Plumwood Mountain 2.2). ‘White on White takes a path through histories and incidents, familial, social, and historical, thinking whiteness, in the hope of opening toward that “existential common ground”’ (‘Preface’ to White on White). For non-Indigenous Australians, relationship with and in place is always relationship with Indigenous Country and the violence and dispossession, both historic and current, attendent on European colonisation. In this context, an ecological ethics of writing requires a decolonising ethos. Settler ancestral narratives (‘White and White’, ‘An Ancestry Cut up and Pasted in a Book’, ‘The dynamite was boiling …’) thread the presentation which concurrently juxtaposes: 1) thinking on a specifically Australian ecopoetics by Martin Harrison (Text 20), Peter Minter, Corey Wakeling and Jeremy Balius (Outcrop), and Bonny Cassidy; 2) poetry by Lionel Fogarty, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Natalie Harkin, Michael Farrell, John Kinsella and Canadian Shane Rhodes; and 3) poems from the collection White on White. The poems chosen from the collection focus on the postcolonial, nationalism (and anthems), deaths in custody, massacres, possession, and treaty. It is the Indigenous concept of Country that speaks into ecopoetics as the interrelational and ecosocial ‘ground’ for ethical writing that unsettles the ‘white possessive’ through an openness to the narratives (whether or not these can be ‘known’) and agency of Country. Unsettling is first an ‘unsettling through writing’ of the writer’s own imaginary, a bringing to consciousness of the inheritance of colonisation, with the hope of contributing along with many others to the conditions of possibility for an emerging cultural imaginary that reflects what Minter describes as ‘a decolonising geopoetics’.Rob St John My research broadly examines (and experiments with) interdisciplinary responses to environmental issues: creative and collaborative practices for complex problems. Based in a geography department, but drawing approaches from ecology, arts and humanities, my research is partly archival, examining the art-science collaborations fostered by Gy?rgy Kepes at MIT in the 1960s; and partly based on fieldwork, most recently experimenting with art-geography approaches to understanding & representing the former military island of ?r? on the Finnish Archipelago. I'm fascinated by ongoing debates over the Anthropocene, & how we dwell in (and remake) muddled, multi-species & ruined landscapes.Archipelago thinking: art-geography experiments on a Finnish island?r? is a small island at the southern tip of the Finnish Archipelago. Closed to the public for over acentury after to the establishment of a military base, ?r? will fully open again in 2016 as part of the Archipelago National Park. The island’s landscape is transitional: with military structures in slow ruin and rare plants and insects flourishing in a patchy matrix of habitats. There is a tension in the island’s landscape management between a focus on its preservation and stasis, and the emergence of alternative trajectories for its ecologies, aesthetics and heritage. In ongoing fieldwork through 2016 / 2017, I am critically experimenting with the potential of transdisciplinary art-geography practice to narrate and experience the (re)turn of ?r?’s multispecies island landscape. This work has three cross-pollinating components. First, research-as-practice as a cultural geographer using film, sound, photograms and narrative writing to creatively experiment with traditional geographical methods and post-humanist theories. Second, a collaboration in the landscape with a visual artist, David Chatton Barker, reflecting on daily exchanges and explorations, and the (co)production of creative work. Third, a remote collaboration through an ‘island archive’ of images, sounds and film with painter Jake Bee. Through the use of film and sound alongside a traditional presentation, this paper is framed as an ongoing ‘working out’ of research and practice along disciplinary, geographical and theoretical boundaries and interfaces. What emerges from such encounters and experiments? How can we design (or create the conditions for) transdisciplinary methodologies that are both innovative and rigorous? What are the art-geography products of such work, how might they circulate, and what work might they do in the world? Most importantly perhaps, can such approaches offer alternative and/or critical perspectives on the ecological and representational politics of a landscape?Sharon KivlandSharon Kivland is an artist and writer working in London and France. She has exhibited widely in and North America. Publications include A Case of Hysteria, Book Works, London, 1999, a work that led to many other books. Filigrane Editions, France, published a small book on her work Le bonheur des femmes, which began in the perfume departments of the grands magasins of Paris, where she retreated after walking the streets in pursuit of Marx and Freud, in the shadow of Lacan.Freud’s walking holidaysSince 2006 I have been reconstructing the holidays of Sigmund Freud. My holidays—Freud’s holidays—have led me to dream of Rome, to Trieste, to Athens, and to the forgetting of a foreign name in several locations when my holiday plans came to very little. There have been other ports of call en route and many digressions. Like Freud, often I suffer from Reisemalheurs. In my last book A Cavernous Defile.Part I (2013) I walks or describes walks, frequently repeating myself, pausing, covering old ground; I send and receives postcard; I go to the mountains in the place of another after sending another in my place. My detours increase and my step is distinctive. The book is about walking and writing, about daughters and fathers and women alive and dead. In 2016 the book was translated into Italian by the poet Silvia Bre, and published by the Museo storico del Trentino. Its launch at the Hotel du lac, where Freud wrote his essay ‘Dreams and Delusions’ on Jensen’s novella Gradiva, included a walk around the lake, in place of a projected but impossible reconstruction of a walking expedition across the mountains Freud made with his son, Martin. It is this I will (re)read as a partial reconstruction, a new text on the path of an old one, stepping lightly, in the footsteps of others, with illustrations and a number of digressions. Panel 5: Climate, energy and historyMicha Gerrit Philipp EdlichMicha Gerrit Philipp Edlich worked as a graduate student instructor in the Department of Modern Languages at Ohio University in Athens, OH, as a lecturer in the first-year writing program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, and as an instructor in the American Studies Program at Johannes Gutenberg Universit?t in Mainz, Germany. In the academic year 2009-2010, he was a fellow at Columbia University in the City of New York. He is currently completing his dissertation on contemporary environmental life writing. Since October 2014, he has been the director of the Writing Center at Leuphana University in Lüneburg, Germany.Drawing the Disaster, Mapping American Oil Cultures: Steve Duin and Shannon Wheeler’s Oil and WaterIn recent years, Stephanie LeMenager, Matthew T. Huber, Daniel Worden, and other critics have investigated different dimensions of oil culture. In the environmental humanities in particular, many studies have focused on literary and visual representations of and made possible by oil. Several scholars have, for example, examined the images of oil extraction, refinement, and consumption taken by the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, whereas others have discussed Oil! (1926-27) by the American writer and social reformer Upton Sinclair. Despite the growing number of studies on the discursive and material nexus of oil and culture, little research has been done on representations of oil in cartoons, comic strips, comic books, or graphic novels. Drawing on recent contributions to the discourse on oil culture in the environmental humanities and debates in comics studies on narratology and the limits and possibilities of the medium, this paper seeks to address this gap in the literature. Focusing on the graphic nonfiction narrative Oil & Water (2011) by writer Steve Duin, artist Shannon Wheeler, and editor Mike Rosen, this paper argues that the distinct features of the medium of comics allow for representations of oil cultures that are nuanced and that differ from those in, to give but two examples, photographs or novels. More specifically, this paper shows how Wheeler’s art in particular seeks to visualize a disaster that, due to its scale and location, cannot be represented. The use of gutters and frames and narrative gaps in Oil & Water indirectly highlight the numerous connections between Deepwater Horizon disaster and the oil cultures along the Gulf Coast. By stressing the representational potential of Duin, Wheeler, and Rosen’s graphic nonfiction narrative, this paper also calls for a more sustained conversation between scholars in the environmental humanities and those in comics studies and further research on what Sid Dobrin refers to as ecocomix.Matthew GriffithsI completed a PhD at Durham University in 2013, re-reading Modernist poetry in the light of climate change, and my monograph The New Poetics of Climate Change is published as part of Bloomsbury Academic’s Environmental Cultures series this summer. My poetry has appeared in The Clearing, Stand and The Dark Horse, while my collection Natural Economy was published Red Squirrel Press in 2016. I have also contributed to Big Finish’s Doctor Who and Bernice Summerfield fiction ranges.A Poetic Palaver: (Un)considered responses to ‘poetry and climate change’Multiple conversations about climate change continue outside ecocriticism, but share neither the discipline’s concerns nor its ethical commitments. We must be prepared to cross the lines if we are to engage with these extradisciplinary viewpoints, particularly where they are uninformed or oppositional: I propose to write several poems incorporating and responding to such views as I have encountered them, focusing specifically on the possibilities of poetry in a changing, and challenging, climate.In responding to these voices, I am interested in several considerations:· how those outside the discipline, and outside academia, perceive our work· by what channels others’ views are communicated to us, the discrepancy between these and our literary and academic practices of communication, and how we might transgress that boundary· how the apparent rejection of the “expert” in the popular discourse of 2016 might prompt us to reposition our work as writers and critics.In the paper, I will use voices from interactions I have had about my doctoral research as cues for the themes and forms for three or four poems, in order to open out our disciplinary conversation. Having used the phrase “poetry and climate change” to describe my research, I have received reactions ranging from bafflement and enthusiasm to derision and indifference, and collected several remarks from such conversations: for instance, while at a wedding last year, I told one guest about my work and she took it upon herself to persuade others to write poems that might interest me. In contrast to such receptivity, online comments that followed my appearance on University Challenge in September 2010, in which I introduced myself as “reading for a PhD in poetry and climate change”, were largely negative, and several such posts contained compositions of their own that imagined the kinds of text I might be studying.By developing and responding to these remarks in poems, I aim to create what Ulrich Beck refers to as a “palaver model”, in which “it is unclear who may not contribute to the discussion” – in contrast to “the expert-monopoly or technocratic decision model” (World at Risk, 2009; p.125), a model which has been put into doubt in news media commentary on the political upheavals of 2016.My poems will seek to respond to social dissensus rather than scientific consensus on climate change as emblematic of contemporary environmental crises, and I will take a necessarily exploratory, transgressive approach. I will use these compositions in turn to prompt critical reflection, with the intention of posing new questions for ecopoetry and ecocriticism, and their position in the world in 2017.Dr Sam SolnickI’m the William Noble Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Liverpool where I also help run the Literature and Science Hub. I joined the department after teaching at UCL and Queen Mary, where I completed my PhD in 2014. My first monograph Poetry and the Anthropocene was published in 2016 and I've also published on the relationship between environment and poetry, performance, and the short story. I'm currently working on a new project on representations of climate change across the arts.Apocalypse Then: exploring environmental crisis through contemporary historical fictionIn an influential 2009 article, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that climate change and the Anthropocene challenge the way we think about history. One of the most significant aspects of the Anthropocene as a concept is that it reminds us that our environmental awareness does not just mean addressing the present, and the alarming futures into which it may develop, but the past too. Ecocriticism, like other parts of the environmental humanities, has sometimes sought to excavate the past, analysing periods from the classical and medieval onwards in order to better understand the historical roots of our environmental crises. However, as Adam Trexler has shown in his study Anthropocene Fictions, the majority of novelists who have engaged with contemporary environmental issues such as climate change, do so through texts set in the future (where we find a preponderance of dystopic and apocalyptic fiction) or, to a lesser extent, by creating what Trexler calls an “Anthropocene Realism” set in the present. Unsurprisingly, critics interested in contemporary fiction have followed suit, focusing primarily on novels set in the present or future. However, a growing body of historical fiction has emerged that engages with climate change and other environmental concerns and in doing so chimes with Frederic Jameson’s sense of ‘a new form of the historical novel defined by its relation to future fully as much as to past’. My paper will explore how historical fiction has begun to engage with questions of climate change and the Anthropocene. It will look at several examples including Paul Kingsnorth’s 2014 medieval apocalypse The Wake (itself part of a trans-temporal trilogy set across 2,000 years), Annie Proulx’s 2016 Barkskins (which tracks the relationship between economy and ecology through several hundred years in North-Eastern America) and Cloud Atlas (2006), David Mitchell’s multi-genre trans-historical novel which moves from eighteenth-century travel-journal to apocalyptic future-history. Through these novels I will highlight some of the possibilities (and pitfalls) of using historical fiction, showing how it provides a lens through which to examine shifting conceptions of place and planet in relation to empire, globalisation and technology.C-M-I-T Abstracts Friday 8 SeptemberParallel Panels Session EPanel 1: Culture and customRebecca FordRebecca Ford is a postgraduate research student with the University of the Highlands and Islands, based at the Centre for Nordic Studies in Orkney - where she previously completed an MLitt in Highlands and Islands Literature. Her PhD title is "Words and Waves: a dialogical approach to discourse, community, and marine renewable energy in Orkney.” In her research Rebecca is exploring the role of narrative in the formation and shaping of discourse communities, the idea of community as a creative, dialogical process, and the importance of place in meaning making. She is a postgraduate representative on the executive committee of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE-UKI), a member of the International Society for the Study of Interactivity, Language and Cognition (ISSILC), and a student member of the Orkney Renewable Energy Forum (OREF).More than words? A dialogical approach to narratives and the naturalcultural worldThis paper reflects on my journey as a researcher and my experiences navigating between disciplines, explaining why I agree with Per Linell’s argument that dialogism offers ‘a meta-theoretical frame work for the human sciences’. Taking a dialogical approach to studying the impact of Marine Renewable Energy on the community where I grew up in Orkney, I have learned to see the entanglement of technology, politics, culture, economics and environment, and to understand community as process. In discussing the role of narrative in this process, I consider Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogical approach to language as a ‘world view’ in relation to Donna Haraway’s ‘situated knowledges’ and Tim Ingold’s emphasis on human interaction as a ‘mutual, practical involvement in the lived in world’ - identifying the importance of shared narratives, arising through discourse and reflecting embodied interaction as part of a physical environment. The entanglement of culture and environment evident in these shared narratives has led me to approach language and communication in relation to ecological psychology, considering the affordances and constraints, which exist within the naturalcultural (Haraway) world. This in turn suggests the usefulness of viewing language in terms of the 4 Es’ model, usually used to describe consciousness, as simultaneously embodied, enacted, extended and ecological. Such an approach immediately highlights my own entanglement in these narratives and problematises my role as a researcher within a community, which is both field site and home. In addressing the ethical and practical questions this raises I explore the concept of method from a place between disciplines, and characterise the relationship between theory and practice in terms of ethics as praxis. I consider Ingold’s call for fieldwork as an ‘ontological commitment’ and his concerns about the appropriate use of ethnography in light of my own sense of responsibility and answerability to those with whom I engage. Drawing together ethnography with Bakhtin’s observations on the ongoing generative life of texts in the world, I suggest the central importance of storytelling as a process which is fundamental to meaning making, and the power of narratives to shape our understanding of ourselves and our naturalcultural world. Pauline O’ConnellPauline O’Connell (b. Kilkenny, Ireland, 1971) studied Fine Art at IADT, Dún Laoghaire from 1988 to 1992, Social Practice at Limerick School of Art & Design, LIT from 2011 to 2012 (MA Hons.) and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam’s School of Heritage, Memory and Material Culture. Her work investigates the rural discourse as a system of representation: a landscape, a place, a people, a subject and philosophy, that is translated through her practice using sculpture, photography, video, text and audio. Current projects include The Weather Reports, Beating the Bounds and The Community Field. Recent exhibitions include Lacuna 04 at Taylor Galleries Dublin (2017), Our Journey to Here at Visual Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow (2016) and a touring exhibition at Leitrim Sculpture Centre Gallery travelling to Roscommon Arts Centre (2015). O’Connell works between the rural uplands of northeast County Kilkenny, Ireland and Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The Politics of Narrative: speaking from the insideIn, of, about, across and through ‘the rural’ aims to investigate the rural discourse as a system of representation: as a landscape, a place, a people, a subject and philosophy through an ongoing artistic practice. Reframing the rural as an animating metaphor liberates it from any rigid definition that is geographically tamed by representation and is best reconsidered in terms of the ‘postrural’ (Murdock and Pratt). The rural therefore acts as a vehicle for many subjects – a means through which to examine the variability, contradiction and variety of representation and articulation - providing a wider context in which the politics of narrative and the cultural politics of identity can be analyzed and deconstructed, a place where community connectivity and disconnections can be situated and creatively translated. Focusing here on an Irish travelogue which dates from 1840’s entitled ‘Ireland: Its Scenery and Character, etc.’ by Samuel Carter Hall and his wife Ann Marie Hall, my research reveals the inherent politics of representation; heterogeneous textual and visual articulations aimed to promote tourism and future investment in Ireland and by so doing create an illusion of equilibrium upholding and justifying the Union. The broader economic and political context was not articulated - the decline of Irish industries in the 1820s and the onset of The Potato Famine in 1840’s getting no mention whatsoever. The uneven power relations formed by these heterogeneous articulations historically afforded an agency to those who employ it, whilst maintaining hegemony over those who are subjected to it. Which leads me to ask whether the marginalised subordinate their individual perspectives to the consensus of the powerful and if so, why? The superimposing of power framed by the ‘politics of the gaze’ is translated through the appearance of equilibrium as depicted by engravings of engineering advancement and natural order within the picture plane. The canonical guidebook aimed to articulate dominance, good governance and control within the (British) Empire implicates art history, its legacy of depicting the rural landscape as bucolic pastoral scenes. The benign rural landscape is more complex than what it appears to be on the substrate. The reframing of this guidebook through the postcolonial lens opens a ‘space’ whereby a new agency from ‘within’ can be creatively explored through ‘lay narratives’- the ‘vernacular voice’ disrupting the continuity and patriarchy of history.Swetha AntonySwetha Antony completed her PhD from The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India. Her doctoral work explored Indian Writing in English in the light of the theories of Cosmopolitanism. However, her research extends among other areas, into Food Studies, Film Studies and Environmental Studies. Her ongoing research is on the larger impact of Portuguese colonialism and the origin and evolution of the Latin Catholic community in Kerala, which has led to her engagement with the relationship between art, literature and environment. She is currently exploring the concept of tiNai to understand the presence of geographical spaces in the literary, cultural and performative traditions of South India. She currently works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, University of Delhi. Transcending the tiNai: a study of the literary, cultural and performative traditions of the Latin Catholic Community in KeralaTaking off from the trope of travel that is foregrounded by the title and concept note of the conference “ Cross Multi Inter Trans”, this research paper intends to explore the same in the culture, folklores and arts forms of the Christian community endemic to Kerala[i]’s Southern Coastline. The community under scrutiny is the Latin Catholic community, whose ancestors are believed to be the fishermen occupying the southern belt and who were initiated into Christianity largely by the mission of St. Francis Xavier, even though they are also known as St. Thomas Christians. The texts explored are collected from the coastal regions from Kochi, Kerala to Kottar, in Tamil Nadu. A part of the research focuses on the efforts from the part of an organization called “Kreupasanam”, centered in the district Alleppey, in reviving the art forms and folklores that were circulated among the community under the influence of St. Francis Xavier. The volume “Neithal Theerathile Samskara Pazhamakal”[ii](1990) edited by Fr. V.P. Joseph Valiaveettil, which is a collection of the folk songs and performative literature has been published by the same institution. The concept of tiNai[iii] – household in an ecoregion- from the Tamil Sangam[iv] tradition, which categorises literature, specially songs, on the basis of the attributes of landscape that is utilized in the songs, figures prominently in the paper. It explores the extent of the impact of both nature and culture on the tiNai of this community, referred to as Neithal, and their subsequent emanation into other tiNais. Have the displacements of the tiNais due to environmental crisis and other factors relating to occupational, social and religious mobility impacted their endemic literature and its subsequent survival? Moreover, the subsequent creation of migrant subjectivities is approached through the geographical concept ecotone which is a term that designates a transitional area between two or more ecological communities. Have the culture/literature/ folk traditions travelled with the displacement of the community from the coastal region to interior spaces? Have natural disasters such as Tsunami contributed to the sidelining of the culture or can one see such points of crisis as those points wherein the literature/ culture is projected as a means to assert their self/ identity? The questions of remaking and crossing are equally pertinent here and the concept like ecotone helps in understanding how the tiNai has negotiated the changes/ differences in the ecosystems. The broader context of the paper is environmental humanities and tries to explore new theoretical frameworks to comprehend the shifts that have come into these endemic communities. [i] A state in the Southernmost part of India[ii] Translated as “The Cultural Legacy of the Coastal Landscape”[iii] There are five kinds of tiNai that is posited in Sangam Literature – Kurinji, Mullai, Marutham, Neithal and Palai. Neithal is the tiNai that is prominent in this research as is evident in the presence of the term in the title of the collection under study. This particular tiNai is usually employed in literature to describe the pangs of separation of the lovers and the background is seashore. The concept foregrounds the importance that was given to landscape in Indian Literature.also ver, rominently in the paper as St Thomas Christianss well osited as the period between 2 same institution. a term that de[iv] A high point of culture in the history of Tamil Literature and is posited as the period between 4th Century BC – 2nd Century AD. This period has also impacted Malayalam Literary tradition of Kerala as well.Panel 2: Video and FilmDavid IngramDavid Ingram is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Brunel University, London. He is the author of Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema (University of Exeter Press, 2000) and The Jukebox in the Garden: Ecocriticism and American Popular Music Since 1960 (Rodopi, 2010), as well as several essays on ecocriticism in film and music. Eco-adaptation: Gone to Earth from novel to filmWhat ecocritical issues are in play in the process of adapting a novel into a film? Theories of medium specificity argue that each medium produces different aesthetic effects on its respective audience. What do these differences mean ecologically? At least since Scott Slovic’s Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing (1992), ecocritics have valued the potential of literary writing to raise ecological awareness. In contrast, Slovic quotes John Daniel on ‘The Impoverishment of Sight-seeing’, who argues that perceiving the natural world through the primacy of the visual sense prevents a wider understanding of nature as a living system in which human beings are a part. Daniel’s comments may be seen as part of what Martin Jay calls a ‘denigration of vision’ that has also been influential in film theory, prompting the question: do films foster a sense of visual abstraction from the real environments to which they refer? More generally, the move from novel to film is often experienced as a loss. But some film theorists are more positive about film as a medium. For Scott MacDonald, a self-reflexive use of film form can foster ecological awareness in the film viewer, while Luis Rocha Antunes argues that film should not be considered a part of visual culture, but is better thought of as a multi-sensory medium which uses audio-visual means to evoke a range of human senses. It is within this cognitivist understanding of film that cinematography may be described as ‘visceral’ or ‘immersive’.This paper draws on cognitivist approaches to film and literature to explore the different cognitive, emotional and affective information presented by the novel and film Gone to Earth. Mary Webb’s novel (1917) is enlivened by the proper nouns and complex descriptions of the animals and plants amongst which the female protagonist Hazel lives and with which she is identified. As Robert Macfarlane observes, a rich vocabulary of nature words refreshes the ecological perceptions and understanding of the reader. In contrast, Powell and Pressburger’s film version, made in 1950, is broader and more melodramatic than the novel. In the film, ecological information is suggested through dialogue and action, in particular, the narrative of fox hunting, and through Christopher Challis’ cinematography, which frames the Shropshire landscape through the visual tropes of the sublime and the picturesque. How does this pictorialism compare ecocritically with the linguistic descriptions of nature and ecological relationships in the novel? Dr Brenda HollwegBrenda Hollweg is currently Research Fellow in the School of Fine Arts, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. A specialist in American literature and a scholar of the essay as literary and expanded cultural form, she is also a filmmaker. She has worked on a major research collaboration, on the aesthetic and affective dimensions of democratic participation: The Road to Voting, and has published on contemporary documentary and the video essay. ‘A Questioning Situation’: Video-essayistic explorations of fragile planetary configurationsGlobal warming, exploitation of resources, social inequalities are only a few of an increasing number of worldwide effects caused by globalized neoliberal economies. In many parts of the world these economies leave a trail of destruction and violent confrontation. Their growing magnitude, however, is also giving rise to resistant formations in various disciplines and creative fields. In documentary film practice, a greater number of works have started to call for a shift in perspective, asking us to rethink our damaged relationship to the planet, to cosmos and to ‘life’ in its varied manifestations.Essay films, in particular, seem to be a privileged form of enquiry into, as much as resistance to, what is increasingly experienced as a global state of crisis. In her latest book (or, as she calls it, ‘essay’), In Catastrophic Time: Resisting the Coming Barbarism (2015), French philosopher Isabelle Stengers encourages her readers to creatively compose-with the forces, energies and resources of this planet and produce a kind of ‘questioning situation’ (50) that is not giving (human) answers to the problems at stake, for instance by means of data, models and simulation, but is making us think-with and through these multitudes, multiple ecologies and multiple ‘others’ (human and non-human, organic and non-organic), of the world.Drawing on the philosophical work by Stengers but also the writings of Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway and Elizabeth Grosz (with references to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari), this contribution explores the latest video essayistic productions by Ursula Biemann, Hartmut Bitomsky, Marianna Christofides and Patricio Guzman, among others, which respond in conceptually and figuratively different ways to this global state of crisis. As film essays, they typically oscillate between the most abstract and the most concrete: abstract philosophical thought reflecting (on) life as a result of a larger web of forces, patterns and vibrations, and the materially embodied, socio-historically and geopolitically specific that becomes us with each new relationship and in each new situation.Helen HughesHelen Hughes is a senior lecturer at the University of Surrey where she teaches modules for programme in Film and German Studies and Intercultural Communication. Her recent research focuses on documentary studies with a particular interest in the environment. She is the author of Green Documentary: Environmental Documentary in the 21st Century (Intellect: 2014) and has recently co-edited a volume entitled Documentary and Disability (Palgrave Macmillan: 2017) with Catalin Brylla. She is currently working on a new monograph with the title Radioactive Documentary.Radioactive documentary: Between science and popular cultureThis paper examines the word radioactive and its interactions with the world of cinema documentary. It was first used in a scientific paper entitled ‘On a New, Strongly Radioactive Substance, Contained in Pitchblende’ authored by M. P. Curie, Mme P. Curie and M. G. Bémont and presented by M. Becquerel. The Curies’ and Bémont’s paper proposes the existence of a new element radium based in part on its considerable radioactivity. It describes the methods used in chemistry to isolate elements but also spectroscopy, a method developed in physics to identify elements via the light they produce. A translation of this paper was published in the Journal of Nuclear Medicine not only as part of the history of the discovery of cancer but also as part of the history of the use of radioactive materials in medical diagnosis.The availability of the word online in its original context brings it back into circulation with the world of popular culture in a way that has become typical for the 21st century. Radioactivity entered popular culture via documentaries such as A is for Atom (Sutherland: 1953) sponsored by General Electric and made to communicate scientific ideas anticipating the Atoms for Peace project. Radioactivity in films like this has come to be represented via the glowing outline, perhaps a consequence of the luminous watch made with the element radium. More recent documentaries have begun to represent radioactivity in different ways, however, as part of an interdisciplinary effort to normalise it as a phenomenon. The paper examines these different representations and their implications for the interdisciplinary understanding of the word radioactive.Urbano, Carl (1953) A is for Atom [short film] Sutherland Productions. Abraham A. Sherman, (1970) ‘Translation of an Historic Paper: On a New, Strongly Radioactive Substance, Contained in Pitchblende: By M. P. Curie, Mme P. Curie and M. G. Bémont; Presented by M. Becquerel’ J Nucl Med. 11:269-270.Panel 3: Stone and rockNancy Ellen MillerI'm an interdisciplinary Canadian artist, writer and educator based in London, Amsterdam and Toronto. A graduate of The University of Toronto with a BA and MA in literature, The University of Wales with a Post-Graduate Certificate in Education and Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Dance and Music with a Diploma in Contemporary Dance Studies, I’ve recently submitted the written thesis for my PhD at the University of Roehampton that intersects Creative Writing and Dance. My doctoral work investigates the nature of individual and collective memory by creatively exploring ruins related to my maternal ancestry. Playing with the topographies of movement, words and landscapes, I use performance investigations as a basis for my poetry and films. ‘Stone’: Tracing The Burren through visual poetry and performanceMy transdisciplinary practice-led PhD project – Dust Stone Circle: Tracing Maternal Ruins in Dance and Poetry – investigates the loss of my mother’s physical body and my attempt to recover her through dance, poetry and critical writing based on three ruins related to her memory. In the second chapter of this project, “Stone,” I investigate the “maternal ruin” of The Burren, a 250-square kilometer karst landscape in the West of Ireland where my mother’s ancestors originated. Since July 2014, I have made repeated pilgrimages to this “maternal ruin” to research and respond to the stone through mindful walking. Both critically and creatively, I investigate the archetype of the mother through the 350-million-year-old stone’s geology, genealogy and geography. In the Jungian sense, the stone of The Burren possesses for me a “living mystery” and an ancient presence of “Self.” For the ASLE-UKI biennial conference, I propose a 20-minute presentation that introduces the critical theory behind my research and a presentation of visual poetry and dance-on-screen. I’d like to speak about how my interdisciplinary response to The Burren fits into the tradition of eco-poetics, embodied poetics and in-situ writing practices. Through physical immersion in a landscape, the speaking self of “Stone” arrives at a form self-knowledge in a way that depends on both her female embodiment and her ecological roots in the land. The poetic voice in “Stone” relies on physical practices rooted in attention to her body. Those awareness practices connect her to the environment in a way that the landscape itself at times speaks, or participates, in the poem. The resulting visual poetry “maps” or documents the process through interdisciplinary acts of cartographic and linguistic tracing. The critical research of “Stone” integrates the writing of Tim Ingold, Friedrich Nietzsche, Alva No? and Carl Gustav Jung. Aesthetically, it responds to the Zen Buddhist philosophy and walking practices articulated by Tich Naht Hanh. The creative work in this chapter has been influenced by Robert Kroetsch, David Hinton, Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Misha Myers and Carl Lavery. Further information about this project can be found at: dust-stone-circleand stone Tony ClancyI have worked for 20 years as a senior lecturer in photography, media and art, teaching and running courses at University of Central Lancashire, University College Falmouth and currently at University of Gloucestershire. I have also worked as a researcher at Hewlett Packard in interactive media. ‘From Rocks’ (video and discussion)Rocks connote the primitive, and are associated with an era before humans had developed writing and other technologies. They are regarded as inert, mundane, utilitarian, hostile, unfeeling. There is a strong metaphorical and literal link with death. They also have more positive connotations; some are precious, they can represent strength and permanence and are appreciated sometimes for the beauty of their forms. Though understood materially by geologists and exploited by human industry, they challenge our sense of being human, as tangible objects that exist far outside of human time scales. They are, today, part of the spectacle of landscape: Stonehenge, Avebury, Callanish, famous caves, cliffs, limestone pavements etc, often promoted as significant modern tourist attractions. In these places rocks hold a fascination, with their connection to our distant prehistory, (children and academics alike continue to ask how and why were they made) and they evoke a sense of the mystical and an older intelligence. Rocks surround us, but come from a time long before life itself had evolved, or in some cases are actual remnants of early life forms. They are both utterly material and unknowable. My film (as yet untitled) explores visually and sonically some locations (both man made and natural) and rocks themselves, celebrating them as form and meditating on their meaning. The film uses digitally processed sounds made by rocks and stones. The piece will be suited either to screening or to an installation where it can be looped with a full sound set up. As well as showing this work, I propose giving a paper on the themes of the film and discussing examples of art, stories and myths where rocks have become an archetypal metaphor for human struggle, suffering and endurance, set against the transience of life. These would include Mark Wallinger’s Steiner and Folk Stones, Andy Goldsworthy (various works), mythical and literary examples of humans turning to statues and statues coming to life (eg Pygmalion and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale), the myth of Sisyphus, and an excerpt from Buster Keaton’s Seven Chances where he is chased by rocks in a landslide ().Dan ShipsidesDan Shipsides is a lecturer, researcher and artist based at the Belfast School of Art. He was the recipient of an AHRC Landscape & Environment Award, 2006-8 (Touchstone Test Piece) and AHRC Fellowship, 2001 (Lateral Practice and Climbing). Other awards include the ACNI Major Artist Award, Nissan Art Award IMMA, Dublin (Bamboo Support) and the Perspective Award (The Stone Bridge), OBG, Belfast. ’pata-perceiving the CoveLandscape embodiment understood through the engagement of ‘pata-perception in relation to a transdisciplinary, durational, immersive landscape process of contemporary art, climbing, dance and camping. Based on the process, outcomes and analysis of a three week immersive landscape project within a remote cliff-bound, sea cove in Donegal (involving climber-artist Dan Shipsides, the Echo Echo Dance ensemble and choreographer Steve Batts) and its following touring stage production The Cove, this paper will explore a process of landscape embodiment through the development of and insights into a process of ‘pata-perception. ‘pata-perception is a concept that Shipsides is developing that explores the role of willfully disturbing normal modes and habits of perception. It expands concepts from ‘pataphysics into modes of landscape art-practice, most primarily as a way to avoid or subvert the cultural defaults of landscape image, but also in terms of re-fueling creative spatial practice and in facilitating lateral techniques which draw the ‘pata into perception. In this paper the process of landscape embodiment is thought through in terms of time, activity and spatial boundaries. The time and spent in the cove involved in embodied practices, such as climbing, camping, swimming, dancing, eating, talking, singing which brought a close proximity and intimacy with the landscape, allows a different form of perception to develop. This process is frequently referred to as embodiment and is a process where the landscape might be understood to seeps into ones experience through the body as much as the eyes and mind – a process which expands beyond visual perception. The paper will identify this within the concept of ‘pata-perception, aligned with a reading Jarry’s water tension encounter[1], as a way to visualize or cross reference the notion of durational or practice orientated embodiment as a process of observing and making the boundaries between states and forms, human and non-human, tensile, flexible, porous and multifaceted. An aspect of the time spent in the cove was that Shipsides built an in-situ reflective platform installation which offered the opportunity to frame and isolate and merge the landscape and body in ways which allowed the doubling and splicing of space and matter. Where does the land start? Where does the body end? Where does the mind end? The time spent in the cove was part of a project called Vertical Nature Base (2011). During a period of time living in the cove, several artworks and processes came out of the experience and the processes led to the development of the touring stage production; ‘The Cove’ (2012-16) which further transforms and synthesizes those ‘pata-perceptions into a complex work of contemporary dance and stage art installation. In this development it is possible to identify the notion of ‘pata-perception within the root of the creative process where phenomenological experience transforms into new states. This in turn allows us to acknowledge the ranging proximities and agencies within the relationship between our landscape experience and the creative artworks or outcomes that may directly or eventually manifest from that experience. Further info:[1] Book II, Chapter 9. Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician. A. Jarry 1898 /1911.Panel 4: Herbs, plants and seedsGemma CurtoAperion: accessing a jungle of Chinese illusionary gardensIn this paper, I am going to show how Charles Jencks (born in 1938), who is a landscape designer, undertook a similar task as Ts’ui Pên in ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ by Jorge Luis Borges: to create a garden that represents the universe and to illustrate the tensions between order and disorder that ‘Chinese’ gardening brings in Borges and in Jencks’s landscapes. Jencks garden is The Garden of Cosmic Speculation (Dumfries, Scotland, 2003). My aim is to show how Jencks brings to life Borges’ multiverse universe, whose shapes resemble Borges’ Chinese representation of Order, where in both works of art, all possibilities are realized. In Borges’ world, the universe is conceived as infinite Chinese boxes and parallel to the many-worlds interpretation. I aim to show how both gardens grow infinitely. Borges uses the word ‘infinity’ in the Greek sense, meaning chaos and disorder. O’Donnell explains how the word apeiron can be translated as “without boundary” (2009) In Borges’ world, the universe is conceived as infinite Chinese boxes and parallel to the many-worlds interpretation. . I want to illustrate how both works of art entail the tensions between order and disorder that ‘Chinese’ gardening and encyclopedias brought to Western countries. Both ‘gardens’ move away from the idea that humans should impose order in nature through creating formal gardens, by moving towards self-organising ‘cosmogenic’ gardens. Chaotic mazes in Borges and Jencks reflect tensions between chaos and order.Rosie PaiceDr Rosie Paice is a Principal Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Portsmouth. Her current research is in the early-modern period, with particular foci on companionship and community in Milton, and restraint and excess in late 16th / early 17th C spaces.Arguments about gardening: human companionship under threat in Milton’s Paradise LostAs Leah Marcus has observed, Milton has been ‘hailed as a precursor of modern environmentalism and its solicitude for the wellbeing for Gaia, Mother Earth’ (‘Environmental Miton’ in Munroe and Geisweidt, Ecological Approaches to Early Modern English Texts). Indeed, ecocriticism has helped to rehabilitate a writer who in so many other ways is out of kilter with a modern consciousness.In Milton’s hands, however, a dispute over gardening is (ostensibly at least) central to the story of the Fall, and not only emphasizes conflicting impulses in Milton’s relationship to nature, but also acknowledges gardening as an activity that provides respite – at once welcome and problematic – from human relationships: inverting traditional gender roles, the adventurous Eve that sets out on the morning of her fall is already thinking herself beyond the shared marital area, marking her mental separation from ‘domestic Adam’ (9.318) and her connection to other gardening women of her time.Moreover, if Adam’s understanding of companionship – ‘conversation with his like’ that is needed ‘to help, / Or solace his defects’ (8.418–9) – is judged sound by God (8.438–9), Eve’s prioritising of plant life over Adam must, by extension, place her at odds with that vision. Indeed, Eve’s relationship with nature is one of the many relationships in the epic that sits in tension with the companionate marriage model offered by Adam and Eve.That companionate marriage itself sits in tension with man’s relationship to God, only makes the issue of nature’s place in Paradise Lost more problematic: is Milton a proto-environmentalist, a kind of pantheist, a man who had experienced a marriage in which the woman used gardening as a means of escape?All of these descriptions assume that the plant world is an amorphous mass and that Milton’s response to it was uniform. Yet Milton’s descriptions clearly categorize the plant world in terms of positive and negative aspects, and conceptualize gardening as fraught, and (dramatically) earth-changing activity.Linda Ingham David PowerPlants, Paths and Process: notes on a coastal collaborationA muse upon the processes and subject matters contained in the Kinds of White collaboration, Plants, Paths and Process riffs on the repeated journeys and parallel methodologies between visual artist (Ingham), composer (Power) and poet working together.Anna Stenning'Cross-species identification and neurodiversity in Chris Packham's Fingers in the Sparkle JarI will explore connections between Packham's memoir and the new nature writing (more familiar territory for me); I will attempt to address how the uniquely dense language and structure of Packham's book present his distinctive epistemology and ethical perspective; I will tentatively connect his ideas to some of the early debates about neurodiversity and critiques of normative cognition (with reference to Temple Grandin's work in Animals in Translation), and I will attempt to situate all of this within emerging discussions of cross-species identification and empathy in the environmental humanities.Panel 5: Eco-activism and poetryHelen MooreHelen Moore is an ecopoet, socially engaged artist and activist based in NE Scotland.She has an MA (with distinction) in Comparative and General Literature from Edinburgh University, and her ecopoetry is published internationally. Her debut collection, ‘Hedge Fund, And Other Living Margins’ (Shearsman Books, 2012), was described by Alasdair Paterson as being “in the great tradition of visionary politics in British poetry.” Her second, ‘ECOZOA’ (Permanent Publications, 2015) has been acclaimed by John Kinsella, as “a milestone in the journey of ecopoetics”. Helen’s work is already taught in some British and Australian universities, and she shares her work widely – in 2016 a recording of her work were featured at Sydney Environment Institute’s symposium, ‘Hacking the Anthropocene’. Her literary readings are characterized by elements of performance poetry and sometimes percussion ormusical accompaniment. She also collaborates with film-maker, Howard Vause, and their award-winning poetry films feature during Helen’s performance.ECOZOA: Revisioning the AnthropoceneThe current geological epoch, named the Holocene, encompasses the growth and impacts of industrial civilisation on our planetary ecosystems. Given these impacts, which have global significance for the future evolution of all living species, a new term ‘Anthropocene’ was proposed in 2000 by Paul Crutzen & Eugene Stoermer to denote the present time interval. However, critics say that this reinforces an anthropocentricperspective, and deprives us of an inspiring vision for a new ecological age. ECOZOA, Helen Moore’s acclaimed second collection (Permanent Publications, 2015), responds to this critique, drawing on the work of the late American eco-theologian, Thomas Berry, who proposed the alternative ‘Ecozoic Era’, denoting a new age where we live in harmony “with the Earth as our community” (The Great Work, Our Way intothe Future). ECOZOA also references the central tensions within William Blake’s mythology. In witnessing the onset of the industrial revolution, Blake saw how ‘reason’, personified as ‘Urizen’, a patriarchal figure wielding his compass, had come to dominate Western consciousness. In The Four Zoas Blake indicates the near annihilation that occurs whenAlbion is subject to urizenic tyranny. The remaining ‘zoas’ – ‘Tharmas’ (the body), ‘Luvah’ (the heart) and ‘Urthona’ (the imagination), which together constitute both the universal human and the ancient land of Britain –– are nearly destroyed. Significantly, it’s the imagination, embodied as Los, the prophet/blacksmith, and Jerusalem, the feminine embodiment of forgiveness, who resist, and secure Albion’s redemption.Writing from within modern Western culture, where alternatives to global capitalism are rarely envisioned and the popular imagination has been colonised by notions of apocalypse, Helen suggests the psycho-emotional terrain that underpins the creation of a sustainable society, and celebrates alternatives, adaptations and the reciprocal restoration work that may yet secure an inhabitable world for future generations. As Berry reminds us, the Ecozoic Era is a phenomenon “we must will into being”.Terry GiffordA co-founder of ASLE-UKI, Terry Gifford is author of Green Voices (2011; 1995), Pastoral (1999) and Reconnecting with John Muir (2006). Chair of the Ted Hughes Society, Terry Gifford is the author/editor/co-editor of seven books (and seven chapters in books) on Ted Hughes including Ted Hughes (2009), The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes (2011), New Casebooks: Ted Hughes (2015) and Ted Hughes in Context (2018). He is Visiting Scholar at Bath Spa University’s Research Centre for Environmental Humanities and Profesor Honorifico at the University of Alicante, Spain.Interdisciplinarity in the Greening of Ted HughesAt the last ASLE-UKI conference I documented the way, from 1960 to 1980, the countryside in British literature metamorphosed into the environment. The story of the ‘greening’ of Ted Hughes might exemplify this shift from pastoral to post-pastoral, his career seeming to both reflect and, indeed, drive that process. But what would the stages of the greening of a poet of that era look like? Has such an analysis ever been undertaken? What might such a story tell us about interdisciplinarity from a poet educated in the climate of the Two Cultures debate about Arts and Sciences, whose early poetry was anti-science and later came to be informed by science, but who became aware of science ‘hired’ by vested interests in conservation campaigns? The case will be made for six stages in the greening of Ted Hughes, with reference to specific texts for each stage.The first stage is his introduction to his local environment around Mytholmroyd by his older brother Gerald, with his gun. What is interesting is what might now be called the ecopsychology of the bit of countryside seen from the family front door in West Yorkshire, as found in ‘Crow Hill’, for example. The second stage might be called ‘capturing’ rather than shooting animals at his second childhood home in South Yorkshire in farmland Hughes roamed on the other side of the ‘dead Don’. The poem ‘Pike’ represents this stage of close attention to animal life.Hughes very much resisted the ‘cellophane’ nature of America and it was there that Hughes became an environmentalist, as revealed in his review of Max Nicholson’s book The Environmental Revolution in a magazine he had persuaded his Cambridge friend David Ross to start in 1969: Your Environment. By this time Hughes had been quietly working as an activist on water quality in north Devon’s rivers. The poem ‘1984 On “The Taka Trail”’ loads the reader with data on this issue, taking problematic artistic risks with scientific information.Finally, there is a stage of global concerns from the Poet Laureate whose review of the book Your World refers to the crucial role of the arts in raising public consciousness of the world-wide environmental crisis. Hughes’s archive reveals that a year before he died in 1998 he wrote of Prince Philip's involvement in the organisation ‘Arts For Nature’: ‘His long experience in the Environmental Movement had given him a realistic sense of the colossal opposition set against it. The endless futility of the endless talk, vested interests of government and commerce neutralise every inconvenient argument with their hired science.’ So, if rational argument based upon scientific evidence was not, in itself, enough, Hughes argued, a different kind of (artistic) discourse was needed, and a recognition that the environmental crisis was a cultural crisis.Emma MustFormerly an environmental campaigner, Emma Must is currently a part-time PhD student in the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University, Belfast. Her debut poetry pamphlet, Notes on the Use of the Austrian Scythe, was published by Templar in 2015. Her poems have appeared in a number of recent anthologies, including New Poets from the North of Ireland (Blackstaff, 2016), Dark Mountain (2016) and The Best New British and Irish Poets 2017 (Eyewear, 2017). In 2016 she was named as one of the ‘Rising Generation’ of Irish poets by Poetry Ireland Review. The Ballad of Yellow Wednesday: eco-activism; eco poetry?At dawn on 9 December 1992, the bulldozers of the Department of Transport, accompanied by dozens of security guards wearing yellow fluorescent jackets, moved on to Twyford Down in Hampshire – a mile-long sweep of rolling chalk in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. With its two Sites of Special Scientific Interest and Scheduled Ancient Monuments from the Bronze and Iron Ages, Twyford Down was theoretically as protected from development as any place in Britain could possibly be. Unfortunately, however, it stood in the path of the proposed ‘missing link’ of the M3 motorway, designed to cut seven minutes off the journey time between Southampton and London. This was just one of over 600 new road schemes announced in 1989 by Margaret Thatcher’s government, described at the time as ‘the biggest road-building programme since the Romans’. Having grown up a few miles away, I became heavily involved in the protests to stop this road, including a period of incarceration in Holloway Prison as one of the ‘Twyford Seven’. I subsequently helped to create a network of local groups across Britain which played a significant role in stopping more than 500 British road schemes by the end of the 1990s, for which I was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize for Europe. I will present a brief factual account of the campaign, including photographs, and read a number of poems from the poetry collection I am currently completing, The Ballad of Yellow Wednesday.David HigginsDavid Higgins is Associate Professor in English Literature at the University of Leeds. He has published widely on Romantic-period literature and culture, including the monographs Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine (2005) and Romantic Englishness (2014). He currently holds an AHRC Leadership Fellowship for a project on British Romantic Writing and Environmental Catastrophe. British Romanticism and Climate Change: Writing Tambora will be published by Palgrave this year.‘I am the Universe’: Writing Climate Change – a critical-creative case studyThis paper will reflect on ‘I am the Universe’, a poetry competition for young people that is running in spring and summer 2017. The competition is curated and judged by the poet Helen Mort, working with the Poetry Society, the arts producer Lucy Wood, and David Higgins and Tess Somervell in the School of English at the University of Leeds. It is funded by an AHRC Leadership Fellowship held by Dr Higgins on the topic of ‘British Romantic Writing and Environmental Catastrophe’. The competition aims to encourage young poets to reflect on the changing landscapes produced by climate change and to produce their own creative work. It is based around on an online challenge, comprising a set of writing prompts, and a series of workshops in schools. It is open to anyone up to the age of 25, anywhere in the world, although promoted particularly to the Poetry Society’s Young Poets Network and the schools involved in the project. The challenge juxtaposes a range of Romantic-period texts that represent sublime landscapes with work by contemporary artists. It can be viewed at: Winners of the competition will have to opportunity to perform their poems at a showcase event at the ‘Mediating Climate Change’ conference in Leeds in July. As the project has only recently gone ‘live’, it is impossible to be precise about how this paper will address the critical-creative collaboration from which it stems. However, it will focus in particular on the challenges and excitements of using literary-historical research as the basis for a creative-writing competition. It will reflect on the nature of the collaborative process between a poet, an arts organisation, and two English literature specialists. And it will consider the value of a developing an historically-informed understanding of climate change through the creative arts, as well as the dangers of a kind of presentism by which past literature only becomes meaningful if it speaks directly to the concerns of the Anthropocene.Parallel panels session FPanel 1: TreesEvelyn O’MalleyEvelyn O’Malley is a lecturer in drama and performance-maker at the University of Exeter. Her research interests are within the environmental humanities, with current projects looking at performing weathering, eco-Shakespeare outdoors, and Irish abortion travel and the sea. She has published in Performance Research, Participations Journal for Audience & Reception Studies, and Politics of Place. Transplanted weathering: performing transcorporeal memory in Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s Snow in MidsummerThe reappearance of weather in contemporary British theatre concerned with climate change has been characterised by a preoccupation with memory and temporality. In Carol Ann Duffy’s 2015 National Theatre update of the medieval morality play, Everyman, the actor Chiwetel Ejiofor slouched in front of a rubbish heap soaked in regret: ‘My parents watched the News and then the Weather. I saw the weather turn into the fucking News.’[1] In Duffy’s play, weather is simultaneously memory and forecast, offering apocalyptic visions of wetter weather to come and nostalgia for a kinder, milder weather of the past.Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s play Snow in Midsummer, however, as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Chinese Translations project in March 2017 marks an extension of such theatrical representations of weather and temporality by presenting weathering as both an embodied and imagined transcorporeal performance.[2] In Ya-Chu Cowhig’s re-imagining of Guan Hanqing’s 13th century play, weather-memories are located in and performed by bodies. The widow Dou Yi prophesises aberrant snow in midsummer to be followed by a three-year drought when she is wrongly executed for a murder she did not commit. When Dou Yi’s organs are transplanted into recipients across the world, they remember the weather of her life and the short life she weathered. Weathering in this play is a simultaneously human and more-than-human activity. Dou Yi’s transplanted memories are thrown into relief by the plastic trees replacing real trees that cannot mark time through seasonal weathering in a dried-up town. The play brings together notions of weathering as an embodied action performed in the present and as a performance extending over time. Departing from Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Lowen Walker’s, after Stacy Alaimo’s, feminist new materialist argument for weathering as the ‘thick time of transcorporeality,’ this paper argues for Snow in Midsummer’s performances of weathering as transcorporeal, stretching through time and space across human and nonhuman bodies.[3] [1] Duffy, C. A. 2015. Everyman. London: Faber & Faber, 44.[2] Ya-Chu Cowhig, F. 2017. Snow in Midsummer. London: Bloomsbury.[3] Neimanis, A. and Walker, R. L. 2014. ‘Weathering: Climate Change and the “Thick Time” of Transcorporeality’, Hypatia, 29: 558–575.Michelle PolandMichelle Poland is a full-time PhD candidate and Associate Lecturer, based in the School of English and Journalism at the University of Lincoln. She is researching a thesis on the role of the forests in the ‘Ecogothic Imagination’ and has an article on Pan and gothic ecology forthcoming in a special issue of Critical Survey. She is Membership Secretary to The Tennyson Society and a Postgraduate Representative for the Executive Committee of ASLE-UKI.‘And so we left our worldly goods / To make our home in these deep woods’: Histories, Revolutions, and Grimm Forests in the Ecogothic ImaginationThough it is still emerging from its literary pupa, the ecogothic is rapidly becoming recognised as a unique and effective mode of critical inquiry. At a time when ecological anxiety and facing the radical strangeness of ecosocial alteration has become commonplace, collaboration between the Gothic and ecocriticism, and between gothicisits and ecocritics, has opened up a theoretically rich and conceptually diverse discourse about the darker side of nature. The forests, oceans, and other various landscapes of the ecogothic imagination help us to address, disguise, and reconsider the ways in which an unpredictable and unmanageable natural world excites both fear and wonder; ultimately questioning what this might mean for humanity and our planetary home.The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss famously commented that animals were ‘bons à penser’, good to think with. Similarly, I will suggest that the Gothic forest is, too, good to think with. This first section of this paper will begin by tentatively unearthing the tangled German roots of an overtly ‘Gothic’ fascination with the forest. In doing so, it takes a slightly crude and circuitous tour of the historically and politically potent (and partly-misremembered, partly-manufactured) acceptation of the ‘Gothic’ in the latter half of the eighteenth-century Europe. While various competing historiographic narratives of the term were developed, one common theme was consistently sounded out: the ‘Gothic’, in part, was invented in the German woods of yore. Meanwhile, in their rebellion against French rule and the entire French intellectual tradition, the early generation of German Romantics were taking an imaginative step back into those woods in search of an ‘authentic’ Germanism. Its evocations of a mythic past ‘uncontaminated’ by modernity not only fuelled a growing interest in national debates concerning identity, unity and nationhood, but provided a leafy genealogical story for the whole community. Escaping the straight line of the city meant entering the dark labyrinth of the forest.Using the original edition of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales (1812), the second part of this paper will explore how the revolutionary impulse that underpins this collection might offer a useful way into the ecogothic imagination. It will demonstrate how the Grimms’ perception of the forest as a kind of ‘archive’ or ‘monument’ to the past as a way of being in the present also reflected new scientific approaches to nature, the ‘geological way of seeing’. That is, the earth came to be seen as having its own histories of happenstance and drama. The antiquarian history imported into the forest could be interpreted to have a double meaning. In the Grimms’ tales the forest is depicted as free, seductive, monstrous and terrifying; it becomes a forceful and chaotic participant in the lives of its human inhabitants. Coloured by a Gothic landscape aesthetic, the Grimm forest becomes symbolic of a key ecogothic paradigm: nature is a lively actor in the unfolding human story. The paper will also briefly direct our attention to the ‘Fairy Tale Tours’ of the Black Forest in Germany in order to investigate the possible environmental legacy of the Grimms.Camilla Allen Camilla Allen is a PhD student in the Landscape Department at the University of Sheffield where she was awarded a scholarship to research the forester and environmentalist Richard St. Barbe Baker (1889 – 1982). Her work is centred on the evolution and dissemination of Baker’s environmental philosophy, in particular the Green Front and Great Green Wall. Camilla holds a degree in Illustration (University of the West of England) and an MA in Landscape Architecture (University of Sheffield).Robin HamonRobin Hamon is a scholarship-holding PhD student in Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield. His primary area of research explores the texts of the Old Testament from an ecological perspective through the application of ecocritical theory. He holds a degree in Environmental Science (University of Leeds) and was awarded the 2015 Bishop Ollivant Memorial Prize for Hebrew for his MA dissertation in Biblical Interpretation (University of Wales Trinity Saint David).Richard St Barbe Baker: visionary environmentalist / interpreter of the BibleThis interdisciplinary study is the product of collaboration between a landscape historian and a biblical scholar. We will explore the fascinating life of visionary environmentalist Richard St. Barbe Baker and discuss the influence of the Bible in his life and work. Whilst Baker wrote over 30 books and numerous articles, founded the charity the Men of the Trees (now the International Tree Foundation in the UK) and is acknowledged as a progenitor of the organic agriculture movement, little scholarly attention has been devoted to discussing his remarkable life. Furthermore, the examination of his written works suggests the text of the Bible played a central role in influencing Baker’s work and vision. We therefore anticipated great potential to collaborate and explore Barker’s life within the specific context of his interpretation and application of the Bible in this interdisciplinary context. Baker grew up in Southampton as part of a family that held religious service and tree planting central to their activities. In his late teens, he travelled to Canada to work as a lumberjack, study divinity and take the bible to isolated prairie homesteads. Upon returning to England his intention to continue his studies was derailed by the First World War, after which he studied forestry at Cambridge University. Baker’s first appointment was as Assistant Conservator of Forests in Kenya (1920-1924). During this period he became concerned about the lack of replanting happening in the country and the effects of agriculture on its water and soil. In 1922 he formed a voluntary tree-planting organisation called the Watu Wa Miti, the People of the Trees, an early innovation in social and agroforestry that catalysed the formation of numerous affiliate international groups. Baker saw the restoration of land as a moral and spiritual duty, as well as having deep practical applications in ensuring that people had a sustainable way of life, free from want and conflict. His most well-known proposal, the ‘Green Front’, a 30 mile dense plantation of trees across Northern Africa to combat the spread of desertification is now a project that is being implemented across the Sahel region. Baker incorporated biblical texts and liturgical traditions into his environmental philosophy and he frequently cited Isa. 35:1 and parallel verses in his writing: ‘The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose’. We will explore his interpretation and application of these verses and also his understanding of biblical authority in light of his conversion to the Bahá’í faith in 1924. Camilla has recently had the opportunity to examine new sources relating to St. Barbe Baker which include poems and songs created specifically for tree-planting ceremonies, and published documents such as his environmental credo The New Earth Charter. This interdisciplinary collaboration with Robin – creating a new academic dialogue about Baker’s environmental philosophy in relation to biblical texts and traditions – is an exciting project to be sharing at the ASLE Conference 2017.Panel 2: Cross-species communicationHelen BillinghurstHelen Billinghurst is an artist and doctoral candidate at the School of Humanities and Performing Arts, Plymouth University. Her research explores how experiential walking can inform (and be informed by) an expanded painting practice. She is interested in journey as story, and how selective use of materials can be used to mediate between the landscape and the space of the studio. Helen is an associate lecturer at Plymouth College of Art, and Plymouth University, and leads workshops at a variety of community andfestival events. She is a nominated member of the ‘Land2’ artist’s research group, a committee member of ‘Smooth Space’ artist-led initiative, and amember of the ‘Walking Artist’s Network’ .A Bestiary for the AnthropoceneOn the southern edge of Dartmoor, where three roads meet, there is a tinychurch dedicated to St Petroc, who was a tamer of wolves. Three miles walk down hill towards Plymouth, a pack of captive wolves is enclosed in a wildlife park. A mile further, and Wolf Minerals is tearing down the hills for tungsten, in the largest open-cast mine in Europe. In Hertford, the sign of the stag is everywhere; prancing across the county council logo and splashing through a rotary club plaque. The hooded crow, corvus cornix was once so abundant on Royston Heath that it was known as the Royston Crow. Corvus Cornix can now be followed as a tourist trail of brass miniatures up Royston High Street, and observed as mascot of the local rugby club. In this paper, I explore the shifting dynamic between humans and animals by discussing how images of animals have increasingly come to represent aspects of human ontology, rather than non-human nature as an absenting of other species. Since the industrial revolution humans have used representations of animals as a way to affiliate the nature of their own being with that of the absence of the creatures around them; pub signs are one example: ‘White Hart’, ‘Red Cow’, ‘Black Bull’. Now, when the Centre for Biological Diversity suggests that we will lose between 30 to 50 per cent of all species by the middle of this century, we are surrounded more than ever by images of animals. From corporate logo, to the cartoon creature, images of animals are used to sell us things, and for our entertainment. Rather than as objective beings, I will address these as products of Capitalism and the Society of the Spectacle. Drawing from theorists such as Guy Debord, John Berger, Tim Ingold and Donna Haraway, I discuss the tradition of the ‘Bestiary’ as muse, examining how a range of artists and poets have responded to this theme. I relate how my own practice as research, as a walking artist with an expanded painting practice, has struggled with the question: ‘How do we imagine a Bestiary for the Age of the Anthropocene?’. Perhaps a bestiary that challenges the concept of Anthropocene, and seeks to put the other species closer to centre stage?Nadhia GrewahlI am a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths University of London researching representations of the environment and nonhuman animals in contemporary American and Native American fiction. Through the use of ecocriticism, my work focuses on literary ecology, ecomaterialism, transcorporeality, interspecies ethics, and the permeable boundaries between the human and the nonhuman. On the ‘Disassembly Line’ of the Human and the Nonhuman: storying hybrid formsSet in 1978, David Vann’s Goat Mountain (2013) follows an unnamed eleven year old male narrator on a hunting trip in Northern California. The novel is set within a desert-like wasteland, which is used to bring to light the vulnerability of the environment and acts to destabilize the human/animal divide. Exploding with poison oak and pine needles, the mountain is described as a veined muscle, the trees as charred meat, and the landscape as bleeding. Using the work of Stacy Alaimo, John Gamber, Tim Morton, Heather Sullivan, and Cary Wolfe, this paper will demonstrate how Vann creates a ‘new reflexivity’ between species and environment through the blurring of the human and the nonhuman.Trans-corporeality is evoked as strange, dangerous, and transformative as the human body becomes less-than-human. Breaking down the human/nonhuman binary, human and nonhuman animal bodies and the environment become zones of intra-action down to a biological and fluid level. Instead of just illustrating green imagery associated with ecocriticism, Vann’s narrative transforms bodies and the landscape into scenes of red imagery. Therefore, creating a material connection between organs, vessels, vertebrae, roots, and stomata. This illuminates the fluidity between the human and the nonhuman using the toxicity of poison oak and the fleshy material of the buck corpse. Through images of monstrous mutation and metamorphosis, the partial fusion of bodies is illustrated as a ‘choreography of becoming’ animal. Creating a synthesis of species, the boy’s bleeding skin becomes part of the environment and buck’s body throws down roots. This suggests that the boy’s body and the buck become one, like two plants which have grafted together. Exploring a California chaparral ecology, this paper will investigate how the human and nonhuman are illustrated in terms of hybridity, injury, and toxicity.Jonathan SkinnerJonathan Skinner, who founded and edited the journal ecopoetics, has authored the poetry collections Chip Calls, Political Cactus Poems, Birds of Tifft and Warblers, in addition to critical essays on poets such as Charles Olson, Lorine Niedecker, Michael McClure, Ronald Johnson, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Bernadette Mayer, Cecilia Vicu?a and others; translations of French garden theory; and essays on field recording and on contexts for poetry such as the third landscape or proprioception. Skinner is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.Nightingale Variations: seeing and writing birdsong, or the disquiet of slow listeningWith Bruno Latour’s critique of “Nature” and his call for a multi-disciplinary sounding of the “tangled objects” of the (small s) sciences, as with Cary’s Wolfe’s emphases on “the estranging prostheticity and exteriority of communication” in the context of disciplinary specificity, I hear a case for listening to animal vocalizations as poetry (or ‘songs’) and for listening to poetry as acoustic ecology, for poetics as a site for cross-disciplinary if not cross-species resonance. In this creative-critical presentation I sound the acousmatic object, modeled so concisely by the sound recordist’s microphone, for a prosody emerging from the necessity of the other. The relationships that subtend this ‘sounding’ are uneven (between disciplines, groups of humans, other animals and humans) and traversed by power structures that both channel and limit resonance. Do our renderings of whale song participate in the rendering of whale fat? Is appropriation of birdsong for human art merely another form of capture and collection? Does fascination with ‘nature sounds’ lull us into ambient acquiescence, precisely when we should be jolted awake, in the unfolding catastrophe of the Anthropocene? It may be that invoking ‘resonance’ (like the supposedly self-regulating homeostases of ‘Gaia’) is just another appeal to magic. Even worse, such an appeal may ‘greenwash’ our ears, attuning us to the business as usual models of ‘sustainable development’. Yet when we withdraw (from) our fascination with the “vibrant matter” of a more than human world, when we bind our ears to the enchantment of sound, bird, insect or whale song, when we turn away from the brightly patterned worlds of sexual selection, because we fear our fascination can make us communicating vessels for compromising power structures, we limit possibility. The withdrawal of media from communication, and reduction of information to message or critique, also leaves entrenched power structures in place: slow listening challenges the silencing of materiality in environmental discourse, which tends to subordinate excessive signifying, characteristic of texts sometimes called ‘experimental’, to signified master narratives (‘Anthropocene’ being only the latest).While the prosthetic binding, manipulation, and even graphing of acoustic time, afforded by our listening technics, by which we register signals and events beyond the scope of the human ear, can reinforce the incongruent boundedness of our hearing, such practices also make us aware of the noise of our self-production. It then becomes more critical than ever to ‘listen’ to noise, from a standpoint where disruptive, counter-hegemonic, compositional practices of “disquiet” (à la Jacques Attali , Cecilia Vicu?a, or Lisa Robertson, as she has it in a recent essay of that title) are not at odds with the preservationist concerns of “deep listening”. Charting a path between deep listening and disquiet, slow listening approaches visualized sound as an aid to writing across species and in relation to the above questions—explored through excerpts from my own experiments in ‘translating’ European blackbird, hermit thrush, and nightingale song.Panel 3: In Praise of WetlandsMary Modeen Mary Modeen is an art-scholar, Chair of Interdisciplinary Art Practice, Associate Dean (International), Co-ordinator of PhD Studies, and founder andCourse Director for the MFA in Art & Humanities at the University of Dundee, Scotland. She has many years of PhD supervision experience in interdisciplinary research, conducting an international practice in place-based research through creative art and writing. She co-convenes three place-based research networks: PLaCE International, Land2, and Mapping Spectral Traces, and is dedicated to a reflective practice of situated being, examined as a response to one’s environment.Iain Biggs Dr Iain Biggs is an artist-scholar, formerly Director of the PLaCE Research Center at University ofthe West of England, Bristol, England, and now co- convenerof Land2 and Mapping Spectral Traces. He publishes extensivelyon deep mapping and related interdisciplinary arts, and hassupervised many interdisciplinary arts-led PhDs. As an independent researcher and UWE Emeritus, Biggs has long experience in mentoring place-based practices; hemerges this with his artistic practice in painting and photography, with critical writing, academic guest lecturing and wide-ranging publications.Christine BaeumlerChristine Baeumler is an art-scholar based in the University of Minnesota atMinneapolis-St. Paul (USA), whose work--in addition to her role as an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies-- is dedicated to ecological art actions. In her practice she seeks to raise awareness about ecological issues by engaging communities in environmental projects focused on ecological observation and restoration. Her collaborative projects include Roof-top Tamarack Bog (2011-17), and Pollinators at the Plains Art Museum, in Fargo, ND (2012-17), which included a summer youth internship program called ‘Buzz Lab’.This three-person presentation will focus on the topic of bogs, moors and blanket wetlands in their many dimensions, framing three different sites in Minnesota, Scotland and Exmoor. Weaving three perspectives and specific types of wetlands into a visually illustrated discourse, the trio of artist/academics compare and contrast elements of ecologically engaged artistic practice, especially as they necessarily work with others from various backgrounds. Geographers, conservationists, ornithologists, engineers, philosophers, policy makers, and phenologists are some of the diverse experts that have contributed to these collaborations. Baeumler, Biggs and Modeen are close colleagues, despite geographical separation. Their research intersects at a number of points, notably in a commitment to the creative interface of art practices, education, and an ecosophical approach to environmental issues and they have a shared appreciation of writing that cuts across conventional categories, such as Barbara Hurd’s exemplary Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs and Human Imagination. Through distinct interventions in the land, such as Baeumler’s Pollinator project, or Modeen’ Healing Earth and Biggs’ Grey and Pleasant Land, the overlay of narrative, memory, and history underpinning the concept of place, challenge the conceptualisation of place. From these beginnings, the study, observation, and participation of site-based engagement begins to weave together a framework of understanding with the real-time actions in situ. Through juxtaposing different material from their various bog, moor, moss, and blanket wetlands engagements, the proposers will offer a multi-threaded exposition of the many-faceted nature of such places that both loosely conforms to Felix Guattari’s ecosophical notion of the three ecologies of human subjectivity, the environment, and social relations, all of which are intimately interconnected, and an implicit critique of a ‘prefix’ mentalité that uses terms such as ‘cross-‘, ‘multi-‘, ‘inter-‘ and ‘trans-‘ to tacitly preserve the underlying presuppositions that underwrite the realpolitik of the disciplinary academy and the role it plays within the culture of possessive individualism. Part of the allegiance we feel to these undervalued places is the awareness of the importance of these carbon sinks, the habitats for all nature of living creatures and plants, the visible changes in a self-correcting water balance, and the laboratory of alchemical transformation taking place beneath our feet. Behind our fascination with the boggy places, the quaking ground or slurping sound beneath our feet as we cross these moors, is the assertion that every wetland is different. Taking the time to observe the trembling bog cotton in the wind, or ‘the sundew dissolving an ant’ as Hurd says[1], is the key to knowing these differences, is the observation that intimately links artist, phenologist, geographer and conservationist. Close observation is the reversal of devaluing, and the first step in the collection of imagery, data, narratives and the lyric embrace of preserving the lands that sustain us all.[1] Barbara Hurd, ‘The Country Below’ (pp 99).Panel 4: Beyond Ourselves: Fostering Empathy Across Ecological, Agricultural and Scientific ThinkingPanel 5: Liminal PoeticsVera FibisanVeronica Fibisan’s areas of interest include ecocriticism, ecofeminism and coastal radical landscape poetry. Her research focuses on the intertidal zone and her PhD is a practice-led creative and critical project on the UK shoreline, where she spends significant time. She has published creative work notably in CAST and The Sheffield Anthology.The Shoreline as Creative Space in the Anthropocene in Mark Dickinson’s Tender Geometries and LittoralThe shoreline has long been a subject in poetry and fiction alike; however, with major changes in society and lifestyle, more and more creative voices are being heard in the field of environmental humanities, contesting, challenging and reshaping this marginal space.The Anthropocene, as the proposed geological era in which we currently are, is a debated subject in terms of its impact, and as linked to poetry it has lead to the creation of radical landscape poetry, which is best illustrated in Harriet Tarlo’s anthology The Ground Aslant.Mark Dickinson, a writer whose work is found in this radical landscape poetry anthology, explores these issues in his latest collection, Tender Geometries, published in 2015 by Shearsman, in which the human and the more-than-human battle for space at the boundary between land and sea. Dickinson’s previous collection, Littoral, also explores this controversial landscape, and the creatures who inhabit it.This paper addresses writing in the Anthropocene with a focus on the shoreline, as a key space for the production of radical landscape poetry, by looking at Dickinson’s two collections. These will be balanced out with extracts from my creative work, which addresses many of the same issues as Dickinson’s. I aim to provide a dialog between the various texts explored in terms of their approach of a costal anthropogenic universe.Inner and outer spaces play a key part in the restructuring of the perspective of the shoreline in an attempt to provide a balanced view of it in a contemporary world. Human geometric precision found in coastal buildings and development blurs the water’s architectural capacity which throughout time has carved an imprecise landscape, one also subjected to other elements.Dickinson’s two collections are illustrative of these ideas, and challenge not only the concept of the Anthropocene, but also that of the radical.Franca Bellarsi FRANCA BELLARSI's research and publication interests are divided between the Beat Generation, ecocriticism, and English Romanticism. In 2008, she convened the first ecocritical/ecopoetic conference in Belgium. She has also guest-edited three special issues with academic journals on topics such as ecopoetry/ecopoetics or ecospirituality (one with the Canadian Online Journal of Ecocriticism, JoE in 2009; one with the Journal of Comparative American Studies (CAS) in 2009 too; and one in 2011 with Ecozon@, European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment). In 2016, she convened the 7th Biennial Meeting of the European Association for the Study of Culture, Literature and Environment (EASCLE) in Brussels. Amongst the various forthcoming book projects on which she is currently working, there is Fractured Ecologies, a volume on avant-garde experimental ecopoetics, in co-edition with Chad Weidner. Chad Weidner and she are also right now preparing to launch their joint work on co-editing the Winter 2017 issue of Green Humanities (Special Issue on Flow and Fracture from North America to Europe and Beyond).Walking the Ecopoetics of Art NouveauTo my knowledge, ecocritical readings of Art Nouveau have never been attempted. Yet, concepts like cross-, multi- and transdisciplinary apply at several levels to this avant-garde that developed across Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, with particular hubs in Vienna and Brussels. On the one hand, being very much an applied arts pendant to the Symbolist sensibility in poetry and painting, Art Nouveau aesthetics flourished across a variety of media and supports, from architecture to interior design, from pottery to poster engraving. On the other hand, though not biocentric as such, Art Nouveau nevertheless thrived at the "natureculture" intersection: not only were its designs thematically very much inspired by the forms of Nature, but it also sought to merge them with human industry and technology. In particular, Art Nouveau's aesthetic experiments with the dynamic and curving line would have been unthinkable without the vitalism and energies of the non-human world, the vegetal one in particular. What inspiration can contemporary ecopoetic avant-garde practice and design maybe draw from this avant-garde of the past? How could the nature/culture blend within Art Nouveau further foster our contemporary understanding of the enmeshment between the technologies of the human and the non-human? Or vice versa, how does a paradigm like material ecocriticism perhaps help us reread Art Nouveau aesthetics differently? And, a point most central to my own presentation, how do the expressions of Art Nouveau in cities where they abound--as for instance they do in mine, i.e. Brussels--contribute to a sense of urban ecology and alter our perception of ecological agency in urban environments? Exploring an applied arts aesthetic very much intent on hybridizing media and forms, my presentation also wishes to blend a more scholarly and intuitive/creative approach: the more standard scholarly sections of my paper will be interspersed with more personal testimony and memoir. In keeping with the "multi, cross, and trans" foci of the conference, my talk will be a crossbreed between academic analysis and the more subjective experience of the Brussels native I am, one who, for many years now, has walked the Brussels land/city/museumscape of Art Nouveau, and whose sense of "self-in-the-urban" has, both consciously and unconsciously, been fashioned by the natureculture hybridizations revelled in by this past avant-garde.Frances PresleyFrances Presley lives in London. Publications include An Alphabet for Alina, with artist Peterjon Skelt (Five Seasons, 2012), Halse for Hazel (Shearsman, 2014) with images by Irma Irsara, and Sallow (Leafe, 2016). Her work is in the anthologies Infinite Difference (2010), Ground Aslant: radical landscape poetry (2011) and Out of Everywhere2 (2015). francespresley.co.uk Tilla BradingTilla Brading is a poet, performer, textual artist and teacher whose earlier writing drew on her experience growing up on a hill farm in Wales, and has evolved to a freer exploration of language and semantics, performance and the visual. In addition to more recent collaborations and on-line pieces, poetry publications include: Possibility of Inferno. Odyssey Poets, 1997, AUTUMnal Jour. Maquette Press, 1998, Notes in a Manor: of Speaking. Leafe Press, 2002, Stone Settings (with Frances Presley). Odyssey Books & Other Press, 2010Ada Lovelace at Ashley CombeAda Lovelace studied mathematics and worked with Charles Babbage on his calculating engine, a prototype of the modern computer. Our collaboration of text and image concerns the landscape where Ada lived in Somerset and how it might be reimagined through a combination of science and poetics. Ashley Combe, in the coastal woods above Porlock Weir, was considered to be an outpost of civilization on the edge of the vast empty wilderness of Exmoor. Their house was designed and built on a lavish scale by Ada’s husband William King, Earl of Lovelace, in the style of an Italian villa, but surrounded by Gothic tunnels and turrets, mock fortifications, as well as fashionable picturesque gardens and landscaping. It was imposed on the existing landscape to possess a view of the coast and conceal the existence of the local villagers who sustained the Lovelace lifestyle – it was an architecture of excess and social inequality. Ada’s involvement in the design was slight, and sometimes ironic, and she preferred to go horse riding on the moor. Demolished in the 1970s, the ruins of the house are important in our collaboration especially in the way their appearance interacts with the landscape. We also know that Ada studied mathematics while she was there and met eminent mathematicians and scientists, and we have imagined how this might correspond to the pattern of the landscape and her life at Ashley Combe. Our arithmetic of landscape resembles Ada’s description of Mathematical Science: ‘the language of the unseen relations of things’. We have drawn on Ada’s mathematical studies to create, for example, an irregular hexagon out of fallen branches near her ruined home, and also applied her demonstration of given and inflected lines to paths around Ashley Combe. In the modern day landscape we have used algorithms and geological surveys to explore the severe landslips along that stretch of the coast, caused by rising sea levels.Parallel panels session GPanel 1: Land and violenceEmily McGiffinEmily McGiffin’s doctoral research examined the environmental politics of isiXhosa poetics. Her postdoctoral workconsiders Indigenous poetics and climate justice in British Columbia. She is the author of two poetry collections.‘The simple truth is they came to oppress’: Nontsizi Mgqwetho and Witwatersrand GoldAs in other parts of the world, the emergence and expansion of capitalism in South Africa involved the conversion of an independent peasantry to a proletariat divorced from the means of production and reliant on an imposed economic order. The process, which gathered force from the midnineteenth century onward, was violent and coercive, wrenching entire populations from their ancestral lands and land-based livelihoods and wreaking profound ecological consequences on people and the environments they inhabited. In the 1920s—an era of labour disputes, rising racial tensions, and shifting rural/urban relationships—Nontsizi Mgqwetho emerged as one of South Africa’s greatest (and least known) literary figures. Published regularly in the isiXhosa-language newspaper Umteteli wa Bantu from 1920 to 1929, Mgqwetho’s poems confront the issues of a period defined by the precipitous rise of extractive capitalism and racial segregation. Yet even as she denounces the social ills wrought by the upheavals of her time, Mgqwetho acknowledges the complexity of the circumstances, in which these very changes brought new freedoms and reordered social structures, opened new spaces and channels of communication, debate and literary production, and enabled a freedom of speech and creativity that would not have been possible a generation earlier.This paper discusses the work of Nontsizi Mgqwetho within the historical context of the period in which she lived, exploring the nexus of poetry and politics, history and environmental change. In particular, I consider the ways in which the emerging South African state actively createda proletariat through divisive and violent means that set the stage for the apartheid order that would follow. While Mgqwetho’s poetry does not always reflect environmental relationships in an overt style recognizable as environmental or “nature” writing in a Western sense, it nevertheless encapsulates environmental sensibilities, environmental justice concerns and changing human/environment relationships in a broad sense. In engaging with the upheaval of her time, Mgqwetho reveals a complexversion of environmentalism that is less concerned with pastoral aesthetics or descriptions of the specific entities of the natural landscape than it is with the overarching structural conditions and relationships leading to the chronic degradation of people and their environments. Byron Caminero- Santangelo (2014) sees such conceptions of nature and environment as part of an African environmentalism that has developed from the centuries of plunder that have characterized the African colonial experience. Unlike Western environmental writing and ethics that are more obviously concerned with “truths of ecology” and the “appreciation and care for nature,” African environmentalism and the writing it inspires is linked to “economic inequality, social justice, and political rights […] of the impoverished and disenfranchised” (Caminero-Santangelo 2014). I discuss the ways in which Mgqwetho’s writing exemplifies this African version of environmental activism, working from Marxist, postcolonial and ecocritical perspectives to show how her work directly contests the colonial and apartheid policies that enabled the exploitation of Africans and their environments and actively produced situations of underdevelopment and environmental degradation.Saba PirzadehSaba Pirzadeh is an Assistant Professor of English at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Pakistan. She obtained her PhD in English from Purdue University on a Fulbright fellowship in 2016. Her dissertation examined the intersections between violence, militarism and the environment in contemporary South Asian fiction. Her work has been published in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment and South Asian Review. Militarised Geography: war legacies and ecological precarity in post 9/11 AfghanistanMilitaristic legacies ensure that technologies continue to degrade, deplete and define the landscape even after the dissolution of war, thereby necessitating a closer look at the issue. Set in post 9/11 Afghanistan, Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil (2008) explores the effects of invasive warfare on both people and the terrain. Linking together the seemingly disparate and distinct Soviet, British and American wars in Afghanistan, the novel explicates how the post in post-war Afghanistan always remains an elusive idea. This paper analyzes The Wasted Vigil to underscore how the overlapping aspects of war continue to act upon the environment in invasive and deleterious ways. Highlighting the overlapping and accretive repercussions of global civil wars in Afghanistan, this paper explicates the affective and technological dimensions of war to establish that militaristic violence engenders precarity for the land and the bodies that reside within it. The affective aspect of war is exemplified by the pervasiveness of fear; such that fear comes to permanently reside within the land as a terrorizing force and continues to cause ecological instability. This instability is compounded by technological assault on the Afghan terrain, whereby smart technology touted for its contained fallout, in fact, causes widespread human and ecological loss. The spatiotemporal buildup of technological assault then gives way to metastasis whereby the aberrant changes in the form and function of the environment give way to weaponization. As a result, the land turns into a weaponized zone which preys on humans thereby becoming signifying how war engenders ecological perversion. The discussion is supplemented by the works of Sara Ahmad, Judith Butler, Paul Virilio and Rob Nixon. In conclusion, the paper establishes that militaristic violence continues to deplete and contaminate the landscape even after the formal dissolution of war, and in doing so unleashes mayhem for the human and non-human denizens of a war-torn place. Joanna DobsonJoanna Dobson is studying for an MA English by Research at Sheffield Hallam University. Her thesis examines four bird narratives from the mid-twentieth century, asking what they reveal about contemporary anxieties around human identity. She is also working on a book that combines memoir with nature writing to explore the role that the more-than-human world can play in giving traumatised subjects a way of expressing the unspeakable. Bomb craters, gravel pits and nests: rare birds and the re-imagining of post-war BritainA familiar image of Britain in the Second World War is of cities, especially London, devastated by aerial bombardment. However, the countryside suffered too, and not always at the hands of the enemy. Thousands of acres of East Anglia, for example, were evacuated to allow British troops to be trained before they were sent overseas, and in places those training exercises led to significant destruction. In JK Stanford’s 1949 novella The Awl Birds, a psychologically damaged serviceman returns to a country house where he had spent happy childhood holidays to find it half-ruined by shelling practice. Militarisation has inscribed the landscape with new meanings. The story of the protagonist’s recovery is intertwined with a lightly fictionalised account of the 1947 discovery of avocets nesting in a flooded bomb crater in Suffolk after an absence from Britain of more than 100 years. This paper examines the way in which the avocets are seen to have a redemptive effect on the landscape, and the extent to which they are co-opted to recreate a vision of unchanging deep England that tends to obscure the way both country and countryside have been altered by war. After the war, the English landscape in particular continued to change as planners attempted to harmonise town and countryside in the vast project of reconstruction. Kenneth Allsop’s 1949 book Adventure Lit Their Star tracks the fortunes of the little ringed plover (LRP), a formerly ‘rare vagrant’, which established itself as a breeding bird in Britain during this period by nesting beside newly excavated gravel pits and reservoirs. I will discuss the extent to which the book is able to sustain the idea that the LRPs are an optimistic sign of human and nonhuman animals co-existing in mutually beneficial ways, and the degree to which such optimism is undermined by a growing anxiety about the potential for technological development to wreak unforeseen damage on the more-than-human worldPanel 2: CrosspollinationJuan Ignacio OlivaDr Juan Ignacio Oliva is Full Professor of the Faculty of Humanities at the Universidad de La Laguna (Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain), where he currently teaches Postcolonial Anglophone Literatures (with an interest in Canadian, Indo-English, Irish & Chicana/o cultures) at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. He has published extensively on contemporary authors, such as Salman Rushdie, Shyam Selvadurai, Sunetra Gupta, Jamie O’Neill, Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, Abelardo Delgado, Ricardo Sánchez, and others. He is also presently the Head of La Laguna Center for Canadian Studies, and the current editor of Canadaria (Revista Canaria de Estudios Canadienses) and RCEI (Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses). He was elected President of EASLCE (the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and the Environment in the period 2014-16), and is currently President of AEEII (Spanish Association of Interdisciplinary Studies about India).Crosspollination: Eco-mythical stories for changing consciousnessThis paper originates in two research projects entitled “Environmental Humanities. Strategies for Ecological Empathy and the Transition towards Sustainable Societies” (granted by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports in 2015: HAR2015-67472-C2-1-R MINECO-FEDER, UE) and “Acis and Galatea” (granted by the Spanish Autonomous Community of Madrid in 2015: REFS2015/HUM-3362). The first project is oriented to the development of ecological consciousness via the interaction between literature, arts and ethics to give solutions to improve the contemporary environmental crisis and thus obtain sustainability for the years to come. Consequently, its transdisciplinary approach tackles both ecological awareness-raising and social transformation. The second project consists basically in updating the ancient myths in our contemporary society, following the School of Cultural Myth Criticism. One of the ways in which ecological empathy becomes patent is by telling alternative stories for changing our vision of the world. I will focus on stories derived from classical mythical archetypes but twisting, manipulating and anthropologically decentring their narrative developments and moral goals for the sake of finding ecological value and equality among species. I will highlight the capacity of texts to imagine other realities and worldviews leading to a better ecological empathy in the relationship between humans and other-than-humans. Emphasis will be put in the ethics of care, the reciprocal respect and the valuing of other beings. Among the stories selected stand “The Dragon in the Cave” (about the dubious communication between a human being and a lizard inside an artificial cave of a 5-star tourist resort in Tenerife), “The Lifeguard of Insects” (that tells the disproportionate story of a human being collecting dead insects in a swimming pool) and “The Last Buzzing Sound” (emphasizing the lack of empathy between human beings and insects when invading each other’s ‘comfort’ zone).Eirini BouklaEirini Boukla is an artist and lecturer. She makes use of a variety of mediums, that often merge, to explore the possibilities of contemporary drawing practice and ideas of authenticity and originality. Her main research interests are drawing, collage, the practice of tracing, ideas of authenticity and semiotics. She has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally. Recent and selected past exhibitions include;Drawing Dialogue, DalgaArt, Craiova, Romania. Pushpin, Zverev Museum, Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow. Printmaking Center & Olive Branch Press. Ithaca, New York. USA. Limerick/Berlin, Limerick printmakers gallery, Ireland. Thinking tools, FAFA Gallery, Helsinki, Finland. Drawing Connections, Siena Art Institute, Siena, Italy. The Artful Scriptorium, Climate Gallery, New York. 8th International exhibition of women painters, Majdanpek Cultural Center, Serbia. Adaptive Actions, Campo AA, Madrid Abierto, Madrid, Spain. Contemporary Fl?nerie: Reconfiguring Cities, Oakland University Art Gallery, Rochester, Michigan. The Last Book, National Library of Argentina, Buenos Aires, Argentina. SIPF, Singapore International Photography Festival, Singapore. Scattered recollections, a reflection on 'Bal n vodi'One can say that an artist’s work is usually held together by a particular style, medium and material. Oscillating between abstraction and representation and circumnavigating processes of tracing and a notion of the already worked, my practice quotes a multiplicity of styles that focus on graphic strategies that reread, rework and reanimate precepts of image-making. Similarly, in considering the writing here as a kind of an ‘uttered’ tracing, this is an experimental attempt that explores a postproduction like editing of found text and voices. Endeavouring to construct a poetic vocabulary that perhaps forms new individual memories and in turn creates objective resonances. Making use of the spontaneous remembering of a multiplicity of writings embedded in my memories from my Greek upbringing, - while working between England and Greece on the ‘Bal na void’ film last year - I will imaginatively and hopefully usefully align an equivocal writing process with the meta-creativity of an editing process. Thus closer to the part of filmmaking which interests me more and nearer to my search for the discovery of new meaning within an already worked text.Charles M PigottMy current project, based at the Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge, and funded by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, compares Mayan and Quechua literary production in terms of how the natural world is perceived, understood and engaged with. The overall aim of the project is to question the extent to which the categories of ‘humanity’ and ‘nature’ can be meaningfully distinguished, and to explore their interrelation, using the method of intercultural dialogue. Previously, I spent a year as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Autonomous University of the Yucatan, Mexico, where I learned the Mayan language. My PhD, at the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London), explored songs in the Quechua language of central Peru in order to deconstruct the concept of “cultural identity”. My work is resolutely interdisciplinary, involving literary studies, linguistics and anthropology in order to answer philosophical questions. Ecological Visions in Mayan and Quechua LiteratureThis paper will discuss findings from a current project that crosses boundaries in two ways: 1) between cultures and languages; 2) between disciplines. Since the 1980s, there has been a cultural and literary renaissance in literature written in the Yucatec Mayan language of southern Mexico. Contrary to popular belief, the Mayas are not only an ancient civilization but also a contemporary culture whose languages are still spoken by millions of people. The same is true for the Quechua-speaking people of the central Andes. Quechua was the official language of the Incan Empire but is still spoken from southern Colombia to northern Argentina. The Quechua literary revival has a longer history, starting in the 19th century. What makes a comparison of Mayan and Quechua literature so productive from an ecocritical perspective is the fundamental role of the natural world across all genres. By engaging in such cross-cultural comparison, it is possible to explore modes of connection between humans and the nonhumans that are less apparent or even absent in the literature of hegemonic languages such as English, Spanish, French, etc. In order to cross these linguistic and cultural divides, however, a second transition must be made: between academic disciplines. In this presentation, I shall show how ecocriticism can benefit from the approaches of anthropology and linguistics, by analysing Mayan and Quechua texts at three levels: linguistic, literary and cultural. First, the linguistic level explores how particular stances towards the natural world are constructed through specific structures of the indigenous languages. In Quechua, for example, words are constructed by adding a chain of suffixes which, in combination, communicate particular semantic nuances. In Mayan, deictic affixes are crucial in defining the relation of the speaker to a particular phenomenon. Neither of these can be properly translated into the completely unrelated European languages. Second, the literary level involves a discussion of particular literary devices such as parallelism, through which species are juxtaposed in meaningful relation. At the interface of linguistics and literature is the topicalizer particle which exists in both Quechua and Mayan and is used to particular rhetoric effect in literature. Third, the cultural level involves an in-depth analysis of particular worldviews and ecological environments within which the texts are embedded. The preponderance of ecocritical themes in Mayan and Quechua literature is the direct result of a general cultural tendency to engage in dialogue with the nonhuman world. The paper will analyse two texts – one in Mayan and one in Quechua – at each of these three levels, in order to show how a transdisciplinary and cross-cultural/cross-linguistic orientation can shed new light on the diverse modes of relation between culture and nature, the human and the nonhuman. The paper will conclude with some theoretical reflections on the extent to which the terms “culture” and “nature” remain useful (or otherwise), drawing on such thinkers as Donna Haraway, Eduardo Kohn, Philippe Descola and Merleau-Ponty.Panel 3: VersusJohn ParhamJohn Parham teaches Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Worcester where he is also Associate Head (Research) for the Institutes of Humanities and Creative Arts. He is author of Green Man Hopkins: Poetry and the Victorian Ecological Imagination (Rodopi), Green Media and Popular Culture: An Introduction (Palgrave Macmillan), and co-editor (with Professor Louise Westling) of A Global History of Literature and the Environment(Cambridge University Press). John co-edits ASLE-UKI’s journal Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism (Routledge) and has written extensively on the subjects of ‘Victorian Ecology’ and green popular culture.Biggish Data: Friedrich Engels, material ecology and the origins of data managementEcological complexity invokes correspondingly complex intra-actions and cross-fertilisations of explanatory and rhetorical modes. The scale of our environmental crisis – in the ‘hyperobjects’ (Timothy Morton) of mass species extinction, climate or atmospheric change, polluted matter – can, in many ways, only be confronted via strategies of information management – statistics, graphs, charts, or, where the data is particularly vast, computer-generated visualisation. Yet this is not entirely new. As Morton has pointed out, the nineteenth century, also, witnessed an increasingly fearful perception of its own hyperobjects – geological time, evolution, the conservation or dissolution of energy. Those observations were sharpened and focused by the very factors – intensive agriculture, mass industry, capital, the growth of cities – that Andreas Malm (Fossil Capital) argues underlie environmental crisis. In the first half of this paper I will argue that in The Condition of the Working Class in England, Friedrich Engels anticipated the central tenets of ‘material ecology’: ‘thing power’ (Jane Bennett); the ‘intra-action’ (Karen Barad) of the agency of matter and society; and ‘trans-corporeality’ (Stacy Alaimo). Illustrated via Engels’ vivid descriptions of intra-action – of air filled with ‘fibrous’ cotton dust or factories saturated by water taking bodily shape in respiratory ailments and lung disease – I will suggest that Engels effected the alignment Bennett ‘pursues’ between ‘vital’ and historical materialism. In the second half I will consider how, in this period early in the development of social science, Engels met the complexity of material ecology with a complex mesh of social observation, data visualisation, and narrative. The paper will end by considering what the interplay of quantitative and qualitative methodology in The Condition of the Working Class in England might say about managing and disseminating environmental and social-ecological information today. The closing section will focus on: - how complex material ecologies were visualised into palatable forms (e.g. graphs and diagrams);- Engels’ anticipation and management of the uneasy symbiosis between data mining and data visualisation;- and the role that affective forms – e.g. literary narrative and biographical vignettes – played, in this early social science, in short-circuiting the sometimes inaccessibility, indecipherability, even tediousness of social-scientific explanation. Richard KerridgeRichard Kerridge is a nature writer, ecocritic and writer on critical animal studies. Cold Blood: Adventures with Reptiles and Amphibians, (Chatto & Windus, 2014) his nature writing memoir, was adapted for BBC national radio and broadcast as a Radio 4 Book of the Week in July 2014. It was described by James McConnachie in The Sunday Times as “a minor classic.. exquisite” and by Helen Macdonald in The Financial Times as “moving, careful, humane and beautifully written”. Other nature writing by Richard has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in BBC Wildlife, Poetry Review and Granta. He was awarded the 2012 Roger Deakin Prize by the Society of Authors, and has twice received the BBC Wildlife Award for Nature Writing. Fear and Comedy in the New Nature WritingI would like to give a reading of some new nature writing, part of a book currently in preparation, a sequel to Cold Blood. This new book is concerned with moments of fear that occurred during visits to various nature reserves. I would introduce the reading with discussion of two relationships that are important in this developing work and in the 'New Nature Writing' more generally. The first is the relationship between anthropomorphism, considered as a fundamental and necessary part of our discovery of meaning in the non-human world, and an impulse that runs counter to anthropomorphism: the impulse to imagine the 'umwelt' or perceptual field of the non-human creature. How can these two impulses come together in descriptive nature writing? Can their relationship be dialectical rather than inhibitingly antagonistic? In this opening discussion I will draw upon Timothy Clark's Ecocriticism at the Edge and Wendy Wheeler's Expecting the Earth, among other theoretical sources. My focus will mainly be upon the practical questions - questions of technique - that such a dialectic might pose. I will illustrate these questions with reference to such practitioners as Karen Joy Fowler and Philip Hoare. The other relationship I will discuss, with reference to the same authors, is that between monologue and dialogue in nature writing - between the narrator's voice, used for description or analytical discussion, and the voices of other people who appear in the works. Dr Hannes BergthallerHannes Bergthaller is a professor at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures of National Chung-Hsing University, Taiwan. He is a past president of the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture, and the Environment (2012-2014), a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt foundation, and recipient of the 2015 Wu Ta-You Memorial Award. He has published widely on the literature and cultural history of the environmental movement, ecocritical theory, and the relevance of social systems theory for the environmental humanities. His work has appeared in journals such as New German Critique, ISLE, Environmental Humanities, NTU Studies in Language and Literature, and English Studies, among other venues.Claude Bernard’s ‘Milieu Intérieur’ and the possibility of a ‘free and independent life’The French physiologist Claude Bernard (1813-1878) was one of the founding figures of experimental biology. Among his most important innovations was the concept of the “milieu intérieur”: in order to sustain itself, Bernard argued, an organism needs to insulate its internal processes from the conditions pertaining in its physical environment. It needs to be able to stabilize and regulate, for example, the temperature of its body and the salinity or acidity of its bodily fluids. For an organism, to be alive is to maintain this difference between the external and the internal environment.The aim of this paper is to explore the implications of this concept for the environmental humanities. Environmentalist thought has tended to view the separation of humans from the natural environment as the cardinal sin of modernity, responsible for all sorts of ecological mischief. However much new materialist theory has critiqued more traditional versions of environmentalism over the past few decade or so, in this one regard, it has continued to travel along the latter’s well-worn grooves, insisting that to think ecologically means to emphasize universal “connectedness” and to dismantle the conceptual or physical boundaries separating humans from their natural environments.Bernard’s notion of the “milieu intérieur” suggests that this line of thought fails to recognize some of the most basic conditions of biological existence. Far from being “unnatural,” the separation of humans from their natural environment merely enacts a tendency that is inherent in life itself: to create sheltered, bounded spaces within which a “free and independent life” can flourish, as Bernard puts it in his Lectures on the Phenomena Common to Animals and Plants (1878). Bernard thus not only anticipates arguments more recently advanced by Peter Sloterdijk in his Spheres trilogy (1998, 1999, 2004) and by Roberto Esposito in Bios (2008) and Immunitas (2011), but also suggests ways of unfolding the implications of the latter for an ecological perspective on the human species.Panel 4: Cognitive ExercisesChlo? CallistemonChlo? Callistemon is a photographer, filmmaker and writer. Her poetry andmultimedia have been published in journals and anthologies including Cordite Poetry Review, Rabbit, Australian Poetry Journal, Australian Love Poems and Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry. She is a PhD candidate at GriffithUniversity, Queensland, Australia.Translating white space in transmedia poetryTransmedia poetries are embracing the multiplicity of media types now available, and developing languages and techniques individual to their media combinations and artistic aims. For transmedia poetry to move beyond experiment, elements of traditional poetics can be used to focus poems. In this paper, the element of interest is the compression and expression of thought processes as specifically engaged by whitespace, and how that white space can be ‘translated’ into a transmedia setting. Developing cognitive, neuro and neurocognitive poetics (particularly Reuven Tsur, Helen Mort, and Arthur M. Jacobs) form the basis of theories applied to creative practice. This practice interrogates ‘space’, whether white page, absence of media, or conceptual space, as a necessity of poetry, and explores the possibilities in a transmedia environment. The creative experimentation is applied to my transmediapoetry project ‘A Bird’s Guide to Flight’ using a range media and concepts, from simple metaphoric equivalencies, such as sky space for white space in a visual representation, through to complex balances of layered media types and levels of engagement, such as interactive web poems using text, video and sound. Cognitive theories inform how attention can be focussed and manipulated through foregrounding, backgrounding, defamiliarising, and unifying sensory elements. I putthese theories into practice in the transmedia environment to create different types of ‘space’. Through this process, one type of ‘space’ of particular interest to the transmedia environment is a result of multiplicity, where mass input/low resultant contrast effects like white noise can be equated to white space and assessed for their balance between space for thought, space for distraction and potential cognitive load. In the specific context of the creative project, ‘the bird’ becomes both a focus of attention and a site of multiplicity – physical, pictorial, auditory, tactile, metaphoric, symbolic, ideographic etc. Employing that multiplicity in multiple media while maintaining affective focus and clarity is my test case for creating white space in a poetic transmedia environment. For a transmedia poem to satisfy emotionally orintellectually, a reader must undertake an element of cognitive work to connect it meaningfully to their experience. This requires a degree of cognitive ‘space’ not already engaged in the processing of the sensory information presented. As the types of media input and senses employed multiply, so does the challenge of leaving this space. In an increasingly media-saturated world, transmedia poetries successful in using media-specific equivalents of white space to focus attention provide a space for thought within this new paradigm.Timo MaranTimo Maran is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu, Estonia. His research interests include ecocriticism and semiotic relations of nature and culture, Estonian nature writing, zoosemiotics and species conservation, semiotics of biological mimicry. His publications include Readings in Zoosemiotics (ed., with D. Martinelli and A. Turovski, 2011), Semiotics in the Wild (ed., with K. Lindstr?m, R. Magnus and M. Toennessen 2012), Animal Umwelten in a Changing World. Zoosemiotic Perspectives (with M. T?nnessen, K. Armstrong Oma et al., 2016), Mimicry and Meaning: Structure and Semiotics of Biological Mimicry (2017). He serves as a co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Biosemiotics (Springer).Dark Umwelts, Semiocide and Modelling with Imaginary ForestsA number of problems in nature conservation are related to anthropocentrism. Human-centred environmental discourses tend to become self-sufficient and lose their contact with the semiotic processes in the wild. Anthropocentric views have also been shown to overemphasize the conservation of species more similar to us at the expense of stranger organisms (Heise 2016). There is a great number of invertebrate, fish, reptile and amphibian species that live and go extinct without reaching human awareness, forming what may be called “dark umwelts”. Further, the web of interrelations between umwelts of different species in ecological systems has a complexity far beyond the grasp of our reasoning.Human negative effects on other species are physical (competition over habitats, hunting and other means of population regulation) but they also have a semiotic aspect that can be called “semiocide” (Puura 2013) – a hindrance to or destruction of communication channels, sign systems and significant places that other species use. Semiotic destruction appears to be related to the lack of normal semiotic relations, that is, to humans’ inability to perceive other species as communicating subjects or to communicate with other animals. The crucial question here appears to be the availability of cultural models (Maran 2014) that would allow understand umwelts that are different and strange for us.To overcome the indifference towards more distant species we would need modelling strategies that would put the criteria of comparison outside of the human realm. Some examples of such modelling are critical anthropomorphism (Rivas, Burghardt 2002), multispecies ethnography (Kohn 2013) and experiential ontologies of animal species (Rattasepp 2016). Here I would like to provide an additional approach by taking the metaphor of forest for the basis of modelling. In an ecological sense, a forest is characterized by the extensive presence of decomposers, detritus food changes and organic matter in different stages of decay. As a semiotic system, forest is unlimited, de-centralized, regenerative, and self-organizing. Being a complex and open system, a forest resists formal reasoning and provides space for imagination.Using forest as a cultural model in nature conservation may help to shed more light on dark umwelts as rational knowledge becomes here accompanied with imaginary powers. As paradoxical as it may seem, nature conservation would benefit from the support of artistic and literary practices as these have tools to work with the possibility of life forms beyond our reason and facts.Ron MillandApplied Tentacularity: Collaborative Poetics for the Post-AnthropoceneA paper exploring the possibilities for interdisciplinary thinking can find many inspiring sources for collaboration in Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble. One such provocation is Haraway’s assertion that “we are all lichens; so we can be scraped off the rocks by the Furies, who will erupt to avenge crimes against the earth.” A focus on lichen is appropriate since it is – from the perspective of humans – among the least noticed of life forms, lacking in any discernible form of defense, movement, or much of any other trait humans generally associate with being “alive”. As another writer has put it, lichen is “not dead, exactly, just very still for a very long time”.In likening us to lichen, Haraway is calling for a perspective shift – away from human exceptionalism. We need to engage in a “nonarrogant collaboration with all those in the muddle”. This reaches beyond humans merely studying or classifying other species. New relationalities with our fellow “critters” requires transcending our own false sense of superiority, for the Furies can strike us down as easily as any other creature on this planet. Collaboration in this sense is active, not passive, and entails more than the usual efforts to ‘think outside the box’: it requires the praxis of what Haraway would call “tentacularity”.Simultaneous with Haraway, several other scholars invite us to similarly ‘stay with the trouble’, though from differing perspectives. In Coexistentialism and the Unbearable Intimacy of Ecological Emergency, Sam Mickey asserts that “the human is also a problem. If thinking is thinking of being, in the double sense of the genitive – thinking about being and from being – then thinking is not oriented around the human. It is oriented around the clearing in and as which the human being comes to be, the dwelling of abode of human existence, the spheres of being-in. In that sense, existentialism is not a humanism”, and coexistentialism – or ecological coexistence – entails an intrinsic departure from human exceptionalism. Mickey’s “spheres of being-in” is collaborative in nature – as well as with and within Nature – rendering coexistentialism a kind of tentacularity applied by other means. In this “time of unprecedented interconnectedness” Roy Scranton – another scholar whose thinking is nearly simultaneous with Haraway’s – points out that humans do not need to learn how to sustain a permanently limited civilization. The Anthropocene is where we need to learn “how to die” – particularly from the perspective of human exceptionalism – and therefore stay with the trouble by letting the “emergency emerge…which means becoming vulnerable to the overwhelming reality of other beings.” Like lichen.This paper will engage in an exercise of meta-collaboration in an effort to apply tentacularity, initially, on the level of critique. In exploring Haraway in comparison and contrast to other scholars, this analysis will adhere to the environmental humanities a new sort of scholarly foreground useful for pedagogical application. This presentation will, then, employ ecopoetics to render yet another cross-disciplinary perspective for negotiating the Post-Anthropocene. Wendy WheelerWendy Wheeler is Emeritus Professor of English Literature and Cultural Inquiry at London Metropolitan University. She has been a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, and a Visiting Professor on the Literature and Environment programme at the University of Oregon. She has been a Visiting Professor at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and in the School of Art, Environment and Cultural Studies at RMIT University in Melbourne Australia where she remains the London member of the Art, Ecology, Globalisation and the Interpretation of Science research group. She is the author of five books and more than 50 articles and chapters. In 2014 she gave the first annual Jakob von Uexküll Lecture at the University of Tartu in Estonia, and has given lectures and taught courses on biosemiotics and culture in the USA and Australia. Her latest book Expecting the Earth: Life|Culture|Biosemiotics was published by Lawrence & Wishart in 2016.Avoiding Semiocide, Remembering Aesthetics: Meaning-making in nature and cultureIvar Puura begins his seminal essay on semiocide by discussing the relation between memory and trust. Our capacity for memory and thus social relation is part, he says, of what makes our humanity. In obscuring and forgetting our stories, the meanings of peoples and histories and cultures begin to fall apart. Puura also adds that every living creature ‘being part of a greater whole, carries in itself memories of billions of years of evolution and embodies its own long and largely still unknown story of origin [….] At the hands of humans, millions of stories with billions of relations and variations perish. The rich signscape of nature is replaced by something much poorer. It is not an exaggeration to call this process semiocide.’ In failing to recognise this biosemiotic truth about the loss of millions and millions of natural stories, and in thinking that life is a senseless machine merely, modern forgetting dissolves meaningfulness both in culture and in the more-than-human world.In this paper, I shall argue that these biosemiotic chains of meaning are what we share with other organisms. They bind us together. We depend upon them. Traditionally, myths, folk and faery tales, aspects of religion and art, have used aesthetic forms to give shape to these often hidden connections. In looking for models to help us to recover our relatedness, we must understand biosemiosic ecologies of meaning, and remember that biology and culture are semiotically interwoven. Recalling Gilbert Simondon , Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I shall suggest that such assemblages of meaning and their lines of flight are a mix of habit and chance, something like the enchanted conversations of self with self and other, which spring up in the composition of a work of art, a painting, a novel, a poem, a jazz quartet, a dance, a song or a symphony. These compositions are the modes in which biological and cultural meanings are made: living forms are primordially aesthetic, not mechanical. I shall discuss the implications of a biosemiotic theory of natural aesthetics, and Puura’s concept of semiocide, in order to suggest ways of reading and seeing that might help us to avoid contemporary collapses and crises in natural and cultural meaning-making.Panel 5: Beyond Ourselves: Considering Interspecies and EnvironmentalEmpathy, Roundtable chaired by Diana WebberIn the Age of the Anthropocene, factory farming remains the largest contributor to CO2 emissions, despite mass animal suffering and rising global temperatures. Consumption of industrial produced meat nevertheless remains high amongst western nations. Meanwhile, the United States has pulled out of the Paris Agreement, indicating a lack of engagement on both a personal and political scale. Scholars such as Josephine Donovan have argued that emotion plays a powerful role in our relations with other species and the environment, despite an academic emphasis on reason and empirical observation. This public panel, then, will explore the role of empathy as an emotional response in animal and environmental activism. It will consider empathy as a concept and question its usefulness in inciting change. What are its advantages and limitations, particularly when extended to abstract notions of ‘the environment’ or ‘other’? More importantly, how might perspectives of empathy be broadened beyond the human? ................
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